


Embracing the Role

by inwardtransience



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Body Modification, Dark Lady Hermione, F/F, Politics, Slow Burn, Teacher-Student Relationship, Too Many OCs, War is hell, Worldbuilding, runic magic, the plot bunny bit me and won't let go
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:49:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24192376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inwardtransience/pseuds/inwardtransience
Summary: Hermione is becoming increasingly convinced that, in magical Britain, there simply are no proper authorities. If nobody else is going to do what needs to be done, she might as well do it herself.
Relationships: Hermione Granger & Harry Potter, Hermione Granger/Bathsheda Babbling
Comments: 16
Kudos: 129





	Embracing the Role

> **Disillusionment is the seed from which all discontent sprouts — though it may not become known for years to come, awaiting unseen for the proper conditions in which to flourish.**

— _from the Bremen prison diaries, Gellert Grindelwald, 1915_

* * *

_September_

* * *

Hermione didn't think she'd ever seen anyone in her life who looked more obviously a fraud. And this was after Lockhart who, in retrospect, had been pretty bloody obvious.

It was uncanny. She was a living stereotype, the sort of thing one didn't rightly expect to see outside of film. So buried in shawls and beads and bangles Hermione could barely make out her robes, glasses so thick her eyes were magnified to comical proportions, hair even more of a flyaway mess than Hermione's own. She even had the demeanor — the wavering, melodramatic voice, the fluttering hands, the drifting gait. It just...

After only a few minutes into their first class, Hermione was feeling distinctly embarrassed just being in the same room with Professor Trelawney.

Once she was done with her introductory... _performance_...the 'Professor' set them immediately to work. With virtually no actual instruction, of course. They were to partner up — she idly wondered if Divination were like clinical psychology, one couldn't hold the mirror for oneself — and Hermione hardly bothered a glance at the boys before tipping to her feet and rolling her ridiculous little pouf a bit closer to Neville's table, turning to face him. The smile he shot her was almost depressingly grateful, but she tried to return it as cheerfully as she could.

It didn't help that, after two years, she was growing rather frustrated with the boys' insistence on always partnering with each other. If they actually _ever_ paid sufficient attention in class, it wouldn't be too much of an issue, but they never, _ever_ did. Instead, they fooled around the whole period every period, and then expected her to catch them both up afterward. Which she didn't mind, in principle — she _liked_ teaching people things, contorting bits of knowledge into different shapes, watching the light of understanding blossom in their eyes as a particular shape turned out digestible. But having to go over nearly every lesson twice, once learning for herself (and prodding Neville along when he needed it) and a second time teaching Harry and Ron, was starting to get rather old.

If one of them would just partner with her _some_ of the time, then she could pass off catching the other up to him. It was exhausting sometimes, holding their hands through every spell and potion...

Her rather weak smile disappeared only a few seconds later. Neville had been about to stand, to collect the necessary pot and cups — speaking of which, why hadn't Trelawney simply set those up on their tables beforehand? — when their professor's jewelry-encrusted hand fell on his arm. "Dear, after you've broken your first cup, would you be so kind as to select one of the blue-patterned ones? I'm rather attached to the pink."

Neville's face fell, taken over with a dim resignation. Just one more person expecting the least of him, just one more person singling him out for ridicule. By the drooping of his shoulders, by the lack of any fire of indignation in his eyes, this didn't even come as a surprise to him anymore. No, he expected it.

The depth of Hermione's anger surprised her. But she'd noticed she was more easily angered these last few months. Hormones, yes, she was blaming it on hormones. Not that there wasn't plenty to build on.

She'd tried, she'd tried so hard. She'd _tried_ to maintain the proper respect for the figures and institutions of magical Britain. She'd _tried_ to hold back her doubts, to keep herself from making snap judgements. But they just made it _so difficult_. The tragic mismanagement of Hogwarts, the general ineffectiveness of the government, the rank bigotry seemingly infecting every segment of magical society, obvious in everything from statements from respected politicians in the newspapers to idle comments from Ron (and he was supposedly one of the _good_ ones), the unending comedy of errors that seemed to be Harry's life, _Lockhart_ , one thing after another after another after _another_ , unbroken for two years...

She'd tried, she'd tried _so hard_ , but by now even her own rationalisations rang false to her ears.

And she was _so frustrated_ , with the blatant unprofessionalism of too many of the professors at Hogwarts, with these _bullies_ specifically targeting sweet, gentle Neville for no justifiable reason, that Hermione found herself jerking to her feet. She hadn't even realised she was doing it until she was already standing, one thigh stinging a bit where it'd slammed against the table on her way up. She smiled at Trelawney, the expression feeling all too brittle, and stalked off toward the tea trays.

She took special care to pick one with the cleanest, most unblemished china she could find — _in pink_. Just in case.

A few minutes later, gazing blankly at the dregs at the bottom of Neville's cup, Hermione couldn't help a disappointed sigh. This was perhaps the worst first lesson of a term she'd had in her entire educational career.

She couldn't help feeling this whole endeavor was completely pointless. The preparation of the cups hadn't involved any actual magic at any point. Looking at the random peaks and valleys clumped together, Hermione could _almost_ see how someone might convince themselves they formed coherent shapes. But Hermione was dubious, her doubt only growing stronger as she overheard her classmates' stabs in the dark.

If they'd cast _any_ magic in the process, she might believe there could be something to it. Otherwise, she found the whims of fate a far less reasonable explanation for the obscure patterns at the bottom of Neville's cup than simple Brownian motion.

(Not that Brownian motion was really simple, when it came down to it.)

Of course, it only took a few minutes for the class to descend into a complete circus when Trelawney decided to "See" Harry's death at the bottom of a teacup. Hermione was completely unsurprised, almost as though she'd known it was coming.

Clearly she was a Seer. Maybe _she_ should be teaching this class.

፠

Hermione had seen McGonagall's animagus transformation before, of course — once when she'd been telling her family about magic, again at the beginning of their first period in first year — but it was still quite impressive. Though it raised all sorts of questions. Was it a complete human-to-animal transformation? If it were, how exactly did a cat's brain support a human consciousness? (She didn't know much about mind magic, but that sounded like a problem to her.) It would make sense if it weren't, if she weren't _really_ turning into a cat, just something that looked like one. How thorough was the transformation, then? Did any feline instincts come with it? Was it perfect enough other cats wouldn't recognise her as alien? How exactly was the animal someone could become determined? All the lore she'd read suggested there was one form that came naturally to everyone, but that didn't make much sense — people were naturally people, it wasn't like they _actually_ had some affinity for some random animal. That was spiritual nonsense that had been abandoned in other fields over the ages, but was for some reason still used concerning animagi. Perhaps animagi simply became their favourite animal, and that was misinterpreted as destiny, that would make more sense. Could they gain more than one form, then, if they kept at it? Supposedly, there were American animagi who could assume the forms of multiple animals, suggesting she was onto something. (Old World authorities claim that's some other magic, but that seemed overly pedantic to her.) Was there a limit to exactly how many?

She was distracted enough by her own thoughts on the matter, she didn't notice anything was wrong until McGonagall drew attention to the lack of response from the rest of the students. Glancing around, Hermione saw they all were staring at their desks, or at Harry, looking inappropriately solemn. Nobody was answering McGonagall's questions about why exactly everyone was being so serious.

Oh, for crying out loud. "We just had our first Divination class, Professor."

And McGonagall seemed to understand instantly. Her eyes narrowed, lips pursing just noticeably, sending a stern glare into the ceiling. Directly toward, Hermione noticed, Trelawney's classroom. "Yes, say no more, Miss Granger. And which one of you will be dying this year?"

The obvious scorn in McGonagall's voice had Hermione grinning. McGonagall wasn't without her frustrating faults — so far as she could see, none of the professors were. But she was one of the better ones. If nothing else, McGonagall could be counted on to call out nonsense when she saw it.

"Me." Hermione turned to Harry, frowning at the... He looked rather unwell too, nearly as bad as he had in first year, hunched at his desk with shadows in his eyes. When he'd been certain Voldemort was going to jump out and murder him at any moment. He wasn't... He hadn't taken Trelawney seriously, had he? Hermione hadn't even noticed. She'd been too distracted by her own disdain she hadn't been paying attention...

McGonagall was quick to reassure them, in the process claiming Trelawney predicted the death of one of her new students every year. (Seriously? She really shouldn't be surprised that charlatan hadn't been sacked — they kept Snape around, clearly they didn't care about professors traumatising students.) Though she wasn't quite as effective as she could have been. She kept stumbling over her words a bit. It was obvious to Hermione she was trying to discredit Trelawney's prediction without too directly calling her out for a fraud, thereby speaking ill of one of her colleagues. And having quite some difficulty.

She clearly didn't like Trelawney much. Hermione understood completely. She wouldn't want to have to work with that...that woman.

McGonagall collected herself again, focusing on Harry. "You look in excellent health to me, Mister Potter, so you will excuse me if I don't let you off homework today. If you do die, you need not hand it in."

Hermione laughed out loud. She got a few glances for it, but she didn't care. It was funny.

፠

Unfortunately, the boys didn't seem to think so. Harry, at least, looked to have gotten over it. By the time they got to the Gryffindor table, he was even still smiling, which was unusual for him. She'd noticed Harry didn't really smile much. But he had managed all of the spells McGonagall had given them as a review of last year's material, he had reason to be pleased — Transfiguration wasn't his best subject, after all.

Ron, on the other hand, still looked shaken. He was all too solemn, quiet and eyes downcast. (Not that Hermione was complaining about the quiet part.) Shooting Harry an occasional glance, as though confirming he hadn't dropped dead in the five seconds since he'd seen him last. Ron wasn't the only one, of course, Lavender and Parvati kept staring and whispering, but it was just... She just...

She managed to keep quiet for thirty seconds before she'd had enough. "Would you stop looking at Harry as though he's going to keel over any second? It's irritating."

Ron, absently stirring the stew on his plate — and not, for once in his life, stuffing his face like a boor — proceeded to completely ignore her. Except, not really, because he wouldn't be asking Harry if he'd seen a big black dog anywhere if he weren't trying to convince her to take this rubbish seriously.

"Yeah, I have. I saw one the night I left the Dursleys." At least Harry seemed completely unconcerned by that — as he should be. They lived in the bloody suburbs, it wasn't unusual to run into a dog.

But he really should learn to not encourage Ron. His eyes had gone wide with horror, even dropping his fork onto his plate. Getting gravy all over the handle, Hermione noticed with a frown. She just knew he was going to lick that off.

"Honestly, Ron, it was probably just a dog. I'm sure there are plenty of dogs in Little Whinging."

Hermione was well-familiar with that wide-eyed expression on Ron's face. That was the look he gave her when he was thinking she was completely insane. Which was rather irritating. _She_ wasn't the one having a crisis over a fraud "Seeing" a dog in mushed up tea leaves. Honestly.

Harry didn't seem any more impressed than she was. He was giving Ron a look very similar to the one Hermione was getting. McGonagall had convinced _one_ of them, at least.

"Hermione, if Harry's seen a Grim, that's— That's bad. "My— My Uncle Bilius saw one and, and he died twenty-four hours later!"

She rolled her eyes. Was the entirety of magical culture based on groundless superstition? "I would imagine if people had been told their whole lives that seeing a 'Grim' is an omen of death, it wouldn't be unusual for someone to die soon after mistaking an ordinary dog for one. Either from making a careless mistake or simple stress." Or people claiming they'd seen one afterward, that hearsay being remembered as fact. Mages seemed to have a problem with that sort of thing.

Ron's face contorted, quickly flushing red. "You don't know what you're talking about! Grims scare the living daylights out of mages!"

Once again, the depth of Hermione's own anger surprised her.

And Ron was supposed to be one of the good ones.

፠

Hermione jerked when she heard the curtains around her bed move. She had already pushed herself up to sitting, about to whip around to tell off Lavender (probably Lavender, anyway), when she realised who it had to be, and flopped back down onto her side.

She was the only one here who could get through her avoidance charms, after all.

Out of curiosity, she glanced over her shoulder. She knew she really shouldn't — McGonagall had been very thorough explaining the dangers of time travel — but she was far too curious. She'd never seen herself from the outside, after all.

Not that there was much to see, with how dark it was. The same nightdress Hermione was wearing (she'd duplicated it earlier in the evening), her hair the same fuzzy, tangled mess, just a big, formless blur in the night. She notice an odd glint, a spot of reflected light in the middle of where her face should be. She was smiling.

The indistinct form that was the other Hermione slipped under the covers, settling her head onto the pillow. There wasn't a whole lot of room, they couldn't quite fit without their elbows bumping, but she didn't anticipate that being a big deal. It would only be Mondays. And, really, if she was going to be comfortable sharing a bed with anyone it should be herself. Once the other her had settled in, the shuffling noises fading away, after a last moment of hesitation, she said, "Did you have a better day than me?"

"Oh, yes." The other Hermione didn't hesitate at all, seemingly not bothered by all the warnings McGonagall had given them. Although, the other Hermione would remember her having started this conversation, since Hermione would be her tomorrow, and she would know the universe hadn't imploded by morning, so... "You'll love Arithmancy and Runes. Both of the professors are brilliant."

"Good. If every day were like today, I don't know if I could take a whole 'nother year." Transfiguration hadn't been bad, but Divination and Defence... (Who the hell thinks it's a good idea to have teenagers air out their greatest fears _in public?_ She'd put herself at the end of the line knowing time would run out before she got a turn with the boggart, to save herself the mockery from Malfoy later.) And, well, she hadn't expected Care to be great, not since she'd learned Hagrid would be teaching it. Don't get her wrong, she did _like_ Hagrid, and she had sympathy for him, his life filled with one tragedy and injustice after another as it was. But he simply didn't have the temperament to be a capable instructor. She couldn't even fake surprise at the circus their first lesson had turned into.

Somewhat to her concern, the other Hermione took longer to respond than she probably should have. "Well, there's always Beauxbatons."

Mum and Dad had brought up the idea of transferring multiple times. They hadn't exactly been impressed with Hogwarts, with what had happened the last couple years. And with the dementors lurking around the place this year... Yeah, she couldn't blame them. "So, they weren't that great."

"I was joking. Sort of. Babbling and Vector are easily the best professors here. First impression, but still. But..."

"...that doesn't make up for the rest being awful. I get it." Hermione turned back over to her side, settling in to sleep. "Goodnight, old me."

A giggle under her own voice, she said, "Goodnight, young me."

It took a little longer for her to fall asleep than it usually did. After all, she'd never shared a bed with someone before. What opportunity would she have had to? She hadn't any siblings, she hadn't really had friends in primary, and she didn't get along so well with her only girl cousin around her age. (Not that it really mattered, what with Aimée living in France and all.) But, after much awkward shuffling around and trying to ignore the other warm, moving body next to her, she did manage to drift off.

When she woke up the next morning, Hermione only delayed long enough to check her watch and do the math before reaching for her Time-Turner.

* * *

Hermione walked into the Runes classroom. For the first time in what felt like ages, she felt truly optimistic she'd be impressed.

Her older self hadn't lied about Arithmancy. While the classroom itself had been conspicuously ordinary — some of the maths posters on the walls and even some of the textbooks on the shelves had been made by muggle publishers, hadn't seen that coming — it had only taken that single class period for Vector to become her favourite professor. She was unusually young, even taking the slowed aging of mages into account Hermione doubted she was older than twenty-five, and seemed to have an overabundance of energy, visibly bouncing in place as she'd given her introductory lecture, fingers fluttering in gestures almost too quick to follow. She had a barely noticeable accent, mostly expressed in the slightly unnatural cadence to her speech (she'd been born in the magical nation that corresponded mostly with northern Germany, apparently), not even close to thick enough to hide the overwhelming passion she had for her subject.

That was something Hermione often thought was missing from the other professors at Hogwarts: for professional academics, very few of them seemed to have that, that _love_ for their field. Flitwick clearly did — while he did seem to be bubbly in general, his cheerfulness went into overdrive whenever he was talking about interesting magic — and it was arguable Snape did as well, though it was usually overpowered by his apparent hatred of the very idea of children. (Seriously, why was that man teaching?) The others always seemed to be, just...going through the motions. As though, for a mage of sufficient talent, getting a Mastery was just _what was done_ , and if you couldn't make a career out of it, well, then you taught. They didn't feel personally invested in their field, to her.

That certainly hadn't been true of Vector. It was clear, with every word she said, with every movement as she'd paced back and forth at the front of the room, waxing poetical about the mathematical reduction of magical phenomena, there had been no doubt Arithmancy was the true love of her life. She'd sort of reminded Hermione of a few older maths professors and students she'd met over the years, which was only appropriate — Masters of Arithmancy were the closest thing the magical world had to mathematicians.

She was fun, was the point. The older her had been completely right, and Hermione couldn't help feeling more than a bit of anticipation for Runes. She'd noticed, saying she'd enjoy them, that the older her had listed her new classes chronologically, but when speaking of the professors she'd put Babbling first. That suggested Babbling had made an even _better_ impression than Vector had.

Which, Hermione really had to wonder about that. The gossip around the school was that Arithmancy and Runes were the hard, boring subjects. As far as she knew, they did involve rather more book work and rather less wand work than the other practical subjects. Technically, Runes didn't involve wand work at all. But, if Babbling held up to Vector's standard, they had the more entertaining professors by a mile and a half (with the exception of Flitwick). Not to mention, the subjects were fascinating just by themselves — Arithmancy she could understand being a more niche interest, but who _wouldn't_ want to learn how to do their own enchanting?

She really didn't understand other people sometimes.

Glancing around the room, there was an immediately obvious contrast. The Arithmancy classroom had been remarkably mundane, enough it wouldn't look out of place in any secondary or university. Every inch of the Runes classroom screamed magic. The normal torches and candles and such that illuminated the rest of the castle were absent — in fact, in the absence of any windows, Hermione didn't notice any light sources at all — but still the entire room, from the floor to the ceiling one end to another, all of it was cast with a soft, uniform light. The desks weren't even casting proper shadows. (Which was rather disorienting, actually, Hermione bumped into hers trying to sit down.) Holding her hand over the desk, no shadow. Cupping her hands over her eyes, _still_ no shadows, her fingers perfectly visible. Nobody could mistake _that_ for a natural phenomenon.

The floor was obviously enchanted — while it looked like hard stone, Hermione had felt her shoes sink into it ever so slightly, as though she were walking over thick grass. The desks were obviously enchanted — her seat gave under her, as though made of a stiff but comfortable cushion, and certainly not the wood it appeared to be. Hung on the walls, sitting on the counters along the perimeter, were all kinds of things — some obviously tools, stacks of clay tablets nearly to the ceiling alongside bins filled with styli of different lengths fashioned with different tips. But some were clearly meant to be display pieces — lengths of material contorted into unnatural shapes taken straight from an Escher painting, a few examples of what Hermione swore were magical holograms, runes and even full-colour, photograph-quality, three-dimensional images floating unsupported in the air, a model stage the length of Hermione's arm with miniscule fully-articulated figures performing ballet, a few blades hanging on the wall made of metal gleaming unnaturally bright in the open air. Even the blackboard was substituted with something more obviously magical, the entire front wall covered in white tile, a very faint blue shimmer spread across the surface, bright purple light suspended in the middle, spelling out _Study of Ancient Runes — An Introduction to the Graphic Arts_ in an elegant, looping script.

While this classroom was far more obviously magical than Arithmancy's, the professor was, somehow, even _less_ obviously magical. Which took some doing: Vector had been the least magical-looking adult witch Hermione had ever seen. The simple dress she'd been wearing might strike muggle eyes as a bit too casual for her profession, but if she'd bumped into her walking around Oxford Hermione wouldn't have given her a second glance.

Babbling, though, wouldn't even merit a first. She was a little older than Vector, but not by all that much, looking about thirty or so — magical aging being what it was, she was probably closer to fifty. Her thick dirty-blonde hair was loosely tied back, spilling over one shoulder of her tee-shirt in a tangled mess. Yes, that's right: Hermione was right now looking at a Hogwarts Professor wearing a tee-shirt. A _tie dye_ tee-shirt — a rather muted example, deep blues and purples, but _still_. And _jeans_ , her feet, crossed at the ankle on a corner of her desk, in perfectly muggle _trainers_. Really, she wasn't joking. She'd had to stare for a few moments, blinking to herself, to convince herself she was really seeing what she thought she was seeing.

She would make a joke about the Sixties being over, but back then Babbling had probably been Hermione's age, a little older. So...it _did_ make sense. In a completely absurd sort of way.

Eventually, when the class was filled with significantly over half of her year — she'd noticed how small her Care class was, this must be why — Babbling's feet tipped off the corner of her desk, slapping down to the floor. The students who had been looking around at the enchanted objects here and there with wide-eyed curiosity, Hermione included, instantly snapped to her. (It took the rest, who Hermione noticed were all from wealthy wizarding families, a little longer to wrap up their whispered conversations, clearly not as impressed with the room, having seen it all before.) Shooting a crooked smile around at them, Babbling walked around her desk.

She pulled a pair of gloves out of her back pocket, a black cloth inlaid with lines of silverish metal glinting in the uniform light. Slipping them on, she said, "Welcome to Ancient Runes. I am Bathsheda Babbling, and it's my task to give you all a functional grounding in the graphic arts in a mere three years. Anyone who knows much about the field will understand how completely ludicrous that suggestion is. Three years isn't nearly long enough — for that reason I've been arguing to make this class a core subject, as it is in other schools of magic, ever since my first year here. But we'll do the best we can in the meantime.

"Those of you who _don't_ know much about the field — and with the modern dominance of wizardry and select forms of witchcraft that's not uncommon — you may be wondering what exactly we'll be learning here. What exactly about Ancient Runes makes it important enough, complex enough, that most other institutions of magical learning consider it a primary course alongside Charms and Transfiguration and Potions?" Her smile twitched a little wider, bright eyes dancing. "How about we start with a history lesson?"

Babbling tapped her thumb to one of the fingers of her left hand, then lowered her hand down to her waist, palm first, as though pushing down on something. As her hand fell, the light dimmed, until it was no more than a faint glow, just enough to make out the basic features of the room. Barely visible in the sudden darkness, Babbling did some more thumb-finger tapping on the right, then lightly clapped her hands together.

Between the professor and the rest of the classroom, stretching from one end to the other, a plane of magical light suddenly burst into existence. For a moment there was only light, undifferentiated and almost painfully bright, but after a couple seconds colours split into discernable shapes, a moving image resolving. Hermione twitched as she was reminded of the cinema — the dimensions of the...er, display were even about right, though it did look rather different, lines sharper and colours more vibrant, though fading to a muddy grey near the edge.

It was a river, captured as though from a boat driving on the surface, the water calm and darkened with silt, the shore thick with ferns and trees. A little further past the shore were plots of tilled farmland, broken here and there with veins of redirected water and flattened earthen walkpaths, stretching as far as the eye could see in all directions. There were people, some tiny in the distance working in the fields, some piloting flat-bottomed boats in the foreground, propelled with long sticks forced into the riverbed.

Egypt, she thought without really thinking, noting the simple skirts everyone, even the men, seemed to be wearing, the faint orangish haze on the horizon, the sun lighting distant sands afire. Hermione was pretty sure this was supposed to be ancient Egypt.

Without really thinking, because for a few seconds Hermione could only stare in fascination. She'd never heard of magic being used to do such a thing. A quick glance around the room, she guessed from the expressions she caught that this wasn't something even purebloods saw every day — even _Smith_ looked impressed, and Smith was never impressed with anything.

And Babbling spoke, low and breathless, about a time before the Statute of Secrecy, before Britain was even an idea, before the concept of magic theory really existed at all. Thousands of years ago, in what they now called Egypt, mages did exist, but magic as they knew it did not. There were no charms, no transfiguration, no enchanting or wards. Very primitive potions existed, and ritual magic was performed sparingly, but for the most part the active casting of magic was limited to a handful of exceptionally gifted sorcerers.

One particularly talented sorceress, through a combination of insightfulness and luck, changed all that, a discovery the modern world would be impossible without. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that one woman invented magic theory single-handedly.

(She was still alive, thousands of years later. Or at least someone who _claimed_ to be her, but a tiny handful of immortal mages were known to exist, so it _was_ possible. In an aside, Babbling said she'd actually met her once, the bronze-skinned green-eyed woman in her film-like thing was what she really looked like. Even the purebloods were impressed with that — apparently, very few mages had actually spoken with the Green Lady of Egypt.)

Hermione watched through the whole story, stretching through the earliest days of what would become warding and enchanting, and then after, Babbling's overview of the class for the next year. For once in her life, she didn't write a single thing down, just watching, unblinking and grinning.

She had a feeling she was going to _love_ this class.

* * *

__

_October_

* * *

Hermione still wasn't entirely convinced those quidditch training sessions were healthy for him.

Most people seemed inexplicably incapable of putting it together, but there was something seriously wrong with Harry. She meant, his home life. He never directly said anything about it, always changing the subject, or just muttering something noncommittal if he was pushed, but it was _obvious_ something was going on there. And, let's not forget, quidditch was less than perfectly safe. Contact sports weren't in general, and most didn't involve cannonballs enchanted to bash people over the head while they flew around at reckless speeds fifty feet above the ground. Injuries weren't only commonplace, they were expected.

Which would be concerning enough if Harry were well — but he _wasn't_. It wasn't quite as bad as it always was at the beginning of the year, but even a month and a half after the start of classes Harry was still distressingly scrawny. It was _obvious_ , far too obvious, that Harry wasn't properly fed when he was with his poor excuse for relatives. And if it were bad enough for him to be reduced to skin and bones, there would be other consequences as well. Other consequences that would make being bashed over the head with enchanted cannonballs while flying around at reckless speeds fifty feet above the ground far more dangerous for him than it was for anyone else on the field. Potentially deadly, in fact, even

given magical healing.

The best Healer in the world couldn't do Harry any good if his malnourishment-weakened skull were crushed with a direct hit, killing him instantly.

But, she knew, saying anything about this to anyone would do no good at all. Harry wouldn't listen. She wasn't certain he had any sense of self-preservation at all — which, of course, only brought up even _more_ concerns about his home life, _why did nobody else notice this?_ McGonagall probably wouldn't listen either, she was such a quidditch fanatic she was more than willing to overlook minor issues of personal safety. (Well, quidditch was already dangerous, wasn't it? Was Harry _really_ at any more risk than anyone else? No, McGonagall wouldn't listen.) She could bring it up with Pomfrey, but she had the feeling she already knew — with how she fretted over Harry every time he was put up there, noticeably more intense than she'd seen her with anyone else, she _knew_ what was wrong...but, for whatever reason, had decided there was nothing she could do about it.

She really had to wonder about that. Was the way they did things in the magical world really that different from what she was used to? If someone in Pomfrey's position had reason to believe a child was being abused, as Hermione suspected she did, they would be _obligated_ to inform the proper authorities about it. Yet nothing had been done.

Though, more and more these days, Hermione was coming to believe there simply weren't any proper authorities.

So she couldn't help frowning a little, as Harry slumped into the couch next to her. He let out a sigh of relief as he settled in, looking far too shaky and tired, and just... But he was smiling, in that way he hardly ever smiled. Not the faked sort of smile, doing it where you were supposed to in a conversation to not seem too off-putting, but honest. Pleasant, if exhausted. Quidditch was one of the very, very few things that made Harry happy.

As much as she might want to say something about her concerns, she didn't. Again.

After a few moments of silence, blinking around the common room, Harry said, "Did something happen?" People were being rather more noisy than usual, anticipation seeming to drive their fellow Gryffindors to new heights of...well, Gryffindor-ishness.

"First Hogsmeade weekend. End of October, Hallowe'en."

At Ron's explanation, Harry sunk further into his seat, the all too rare smile on his face swiftly fading away.

Hermione tried not to wince. Nothing really did work out for Harry, did it? He couldn't have anything normal people did, even Hogsmeade weekends. "I'm sure it won't be forever, Harry. They'll catch him eventually." She didn't have to say who she meant.

"Black's not fool enough to do anything in Hogsmeade. Ask McGonagall if you can go this time, Harry, the next one might not be for ages—"

" _Ron!"_ Honestly, the mind-numbing stupidity of— _Not fool enough to do anything in Hogsmeade?_ He'd blown up thirteen people in the middle of muggle Edinburgh in _broad daylight_ , he clearly didn't care! Suggesting it like it was obvious Black couldn't even make the attempt, Hogsmeade was safe, as though he _hadn't_ slipped past the _very best security_ magical Britain could offer! Seriously, Ron was such an idiot sometimes.

Well, more than sometimes, honestly.

"You know Harry's supposed to stay at Hogwarts where—"

"He can't be the only third-year left behind."

Hermione blinked, momentarily at a loss. Using that as a justification for risking his life by wandering around outside of the wards with an insane mass-murderer on the loose suggested such a bafflingly irrational set of priorities Hermione had absolutely no idea what to say.

Thankfully, Crookshanks chose that moment to provide a convenient distraction. Or so she thought at the time.

She hadn't anticipated the common room descending into a complete circus a minute later.

* * *

Ashe wasn't exactly surprised by Granger's apparent decision to loiter around during office hours. She was, though, more than a little confused.

She'd heard tell of Granger before, of course — the quality of her work was a frequent subject of fascination with her colleagues, even while the length of her essays was an even more frequent one of complaint. Aurora and Severus whinged about her on the regular, it was quite irritating. Though, less irritating than having to listen to Septima and Aurora or Severus and Minerva bicker with each other like old biddies, she'd take what she could get.

After teaching the girl herself for nearly two months now, she couldn't say those impressions she'd gotten were incorrect. The girl was brilliant, no doubt about that. She was also irrepressibly long-winded, there was _certainly_ no doubt about that.

Which was part of what was so odd about today. This was hardly the first time Granger had showed up during office hours. She was around quite a lot, actually, rambling off on something only tangentially related to what they were supposed to be studying, though with such bright enthusiasm Ashe couldn't bring herself to deny her. Granger was easily weeks ahead of the rest of the class by this point — they'd already had discussions about topics in practical enchanting that wouldn't come up until OWL year, if only in the vaguest terms.

She knew her colleagues wouldn't humor the girl this far, would disapprove of humoring her, but she couldn't help herself. She remembered being that young and curious and driven. It would probably be the responsible thing to do to say _something_ to get Granger to slow down a little, but she just couldn't.

Besides, it wasn't like she would burn out or anything. If she needed more sleep, she could just steal it somewhere — she did have a Time Turner. No problem.

But today, Granger was almost completely silent. She'd drifted through the door with a murmured, "Hullo, Professor," and then proceeded to wander aimlessly around Ashe's office. Pouring over the titles of the books on her shelves, peering at the pictures on the walls, artefacts laid out here or there. It'd been a few minutes now, and Granger had hardly said a word.

There was obviously something wrong with her. Not in a physical way, she meant. That light in her eyes was muffled, looking dreary and distracted, the crease between her brows far more obvious than usual. She was clearly upset about something. Upset enough she was silently puttering around Ashe's office instead of going off to Hogsmeade with her classmates. Which was odd — third-years never missed the first Hogsmeade weekend if they could help it, especially the muggleborns, she'd have thought Hermione would be ecstatic to explore the place. Instead she was here, looking like Christmas had been cancelled or something.

Not for the first time, Ashe cursed how backward Hogwarts could be sometimes. Albus insisted they didn't need professional counselors or advisors or whatever you wanted to call them, that prefects and heads of house filled the role perfectly well. If he thought there wasn't any need for such a thing, he obviously didn't have much contact with the student body. Which wasn't news, really, but still.

"Did you have a question for me, Miss Granger?" Ashe carefully kept all traces of wariness, or even impatience, off her voice. As much as she did favor Granger, she was _not_ a counselor, and she _did_ have things to do.

Granger snapped closed the book she was perusing, slipped it back onto the shelf. "I was wondering, Professor, are you a muggleborn?"

She almost had to laugh — her name was _Babbling_ , that wasn't a mistake she'd heard any British mage ever make. "No. I'm pureblood, actually." Her family and the rest of their community didn't use the word, and she personally didn't like it, but this _was_ Hogwarts. It was technically correct.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I just thought..." Granger's eyes flicked down, likely noting her distinctly muggle-style clothing, then up to the wall above her head, where Ashe knew her diplomas and certificates were hanging — including a couple from Oxford.

The misunderstanding wasn't so unusual, really. Ashe wouldn't be surprised if she were the only Hogwarts professor in its history to also hold a doctorate form a muggle university.

"There's no reason to apologise for that, Miss Granger. We don't make as big a deal about that sort of thing where I'm from." Well, they did, sort of, but it was complicated, and not something Granger really needed to know. Ashe set down her quill, leaned back in her seat. It wasn't like she was going to get any work done right now anyway. "I'm sure you've heard of the mistwalker clans, on Ynys Dywyll."

Ashe nearly gave the name of the island in English too, but by the dramatic widening of Granger's eyes she needn't bother. "You mean the old druid families? You're a druid?"

"No, not really. It'd be more accurate to say my several-times-great-grandparents were druids." At the blank look crossing Granger's face, Ashe couldn't help a smile. "A druid is a priest, Miss Granger, in any of the various old Celtic traditions, all of which have gone extinct. There haven't been any druids for centuries. You've read about the Household Reformation Act?"

Granger wandered over toward the desk, sinking into one of the chairs on the opposite side. "The one in Seventeen Eighteen?"

Was there more than one? Ashe was only familiar with the 1718 Act. No matter. "Well, over the centuries, the old Celtic religion and tribal legal system gradually faded away — under the influence of Romans or Danes or the French, it depends which century you're looking at. In most of the Celtic world, the old practices were entirely gone by the tenth century, even among mages. Except on Anglesey. There were a few different traditions on the island that were...given patronage, you could say, by the Wizengamot, which allowed them to survive, with much-reduced influence, through to the Statute. But, as part of the reformations in Seventeen Eighteen, these priesthoods were forced to reorganise themselves into formal houses, and continue operating like any other family in magical Britain. We do have some of our own peculiar traditions, but by now even we've stopped practising the old ways. Except for a handful of zealots, anyway.

"So, we aren't druids, but we're _descended from_ druids. If that answers your question?" She ticked a single eyebrow up. But she couldn't keep a serious expression for long, the fascination on Granger's face had a smile tugging at her lips again.

Granger smiled back at her, eyes practically dancing. "Honestly, Professor, I just have more questions."

"Honestly, Miss Granger, I'm not convinced you ever run out of questions."

For a moment Granger's smile dimmed, eyes flicking over Ashe's face, probably looking for some sign of disapproval. When she didn't find any, she broke into a bright grin. "Well, I... I'm not sure how to say this..." She paused for a moment, chewing at the inside of her lip. "I mean, I would assume a community such as yours would be more...conservative, than the rest of Britain. If you see what I mean. But that doesn't seem to be the case."

"That's quite an assumption there, Miss Granger. For all you know, I could be an outlier." Ashe shrugged — she was, of course, but that was more detail than Granger needed to know. "Not to mention, your only exposure to magical culture being through Hogwarts gives you a very skewed impression of what the whole of magical Britain is like. Beside muggleborns, whom the school is obligated by treaty to accept, only the wellborn and the wealthy go to Hogwarts. Special cases are often made for the children of people high up enough in the Ministry or a few other institutions — Saint Mungo's, for example. But, for the most part, Hogwarts students are drawn from the aristocracy of magical Britain. You can't really take the culture at Hogwarts as representative of the whole of the country.

"Which, well, is sort of why I thought you'd be in Hogsmeade today, to see something of magical Britain beyond this school. Or, at least part of the reason."

In the blink of an eye, Granger's smile was gone, suddenly looking drawn and sullen. "I... I didn't feel like going. I just... I'll go next time, maybe."

Ashe tried not to sigh — she didn't think she'd heard a more obvious deflection in her life. For a few moments she just stared at the girl, her fingers tapping idly at the papers she was supposed to be marking. Granger wasn't meeting her eyes anymore, staring at her hands, fingers working at each other in her lap, shifting in her seat with discomfort.

Gritting her teeth, her hand started moving to rub her forehead, before she caught it and dropped it back to her desk. This wasn't her business. This, dealing with students' personal problems, this wasn't her job. She shouldn't have to do it, she _wouldn't_ have to do it, if Albus would just bloody listen to her (and Septima and Severus) and get with the times. Geezer was stuck in the 19th Century, honestly.

But what else was she supposed to do? Just...leave it, do nothing? She just didn't have that sort of callousness in her. Especially not when it was a kid like Granger, a student so clever and enthusiastic. She just...

She could hear Septima mocking her, and she wasn't even in the room.

Doing her best to keep the wariness off her own voice, Ashe said, "Was there something bothering you, Miss Granger? I... Well, I'm hardly qualified, but I can listen, at least."

"It's nothing," Granger muttered, the heaviness of her voice giving away the lie. "I just... Ron is just— It's stupid, it doesn't matter."

It took Ashe a moment to place the name — that Weasley boy wasn't in her class, she only knew of him from gossip. Harry Potter, Granger, and Weasley were frequently spoken of in the same breath by the rest of the staff, seemingly inseparable. Until this year, anyway, Granger was taking electives the boys weren't. (Of course, she was taking _all_ of them, but that wasn't the point.) "It certainly does matter, if it's troubling you this much."

Granger let out something between a sigh and a groan, her hands clenching so tight her knuckles went white. "Ron's just being an idiot, it doesn't matter."

Huh, this girl was quite insistent that her personal issues were unimportant. It was possible she was just uncomfortable with the idea of talking to Ashe about it, but still, even from the perspective of someone largely ignorant in psychology...things, that seemed concerning. "Boys do have an unfortunate tendency toward idiocy in their teenage years."

That was something between a scoff and a laugh, unwillingly drawn through the nose. "I would agree, but they were idiots in first year too."

"Well," Ashe said, smiling, "you know them better than I." Severus certainly thought Potter and Weasley were idiots of the highest order — she felt Hermione's use of _they_ was intended to refer to the both of them — but Ashe had learned by now to not take seriously his opinion of...anyone, really. "Have they been doing something particularly idiotic lately?"

"Oh, it's—" Granger broke off for a second with another sigh. "It's really dumb, honestly. Ron has this pet rat, okay, it's an ancient old thing, sad and sick and miserable. Apparently, its health suddenly started declining at some point in the summer. Now it's so bad I'd be shocked if it has more than a few months left in it. I got a cat this August, a Kneazle mix of some kind. It's amazing how clever magical animals can be sometimes, he understands English, I _swear_ , it's uncanny. Crookshanks likes to chase Scabbers — that's the rat — and he's made a bit of a mess of things a couple times. Which is weird, because he's very well-behaved otherwise. Something about that rat just sets him off, I don't know what.

"And it's just stupid because..." Pausing for a moment, Granger rubbed at the side of her head, face set in a frown. "Okay, yes, it's pretty clear Crookshanks has some peculiar animosity for Scabbers in particular. I couldn't say what it is, I have no idea. Maybe he just knows I find the thing pathetic and gross and thinks killing it will please me, that would kind of make sense. It doesn't really matter, though. Ron takes absolutely no precautions to insulate Scabbers from _any_ cat, not just Crookshanks — he lets the thing just wander around by itself! Cats hunt rats, it's what they _do_. And there are cats _everywhere_ in the tower, I'm far from the only person to have one. If he were so concerned about Scabbers being eaten, you'd think he'd do _something_ to keep it safe, but he _doesn't_. Crookshanks isn't even the first cat to chase him around! The first one to do it so much, sure, but it isn't new.

"So he yells at me about it! As though I can stop a cat from doing what comes naturally, it's absurd! He almost refuses to speak to me at all now, and when he does he's snippy and mean and terrible. And Harry, he just sits there, he tries to ignore the whole thing, like it'll just go away if he waits long enough. And they're both just so, so _frustrating!_ It's all so _stupid_ , and I just..." Granger trailed off, face in her hands, the slow shaking of her head setting her frizzy hair to shifting, back and forth, back and forth.

Frowning to herself, Ashe bit her lip. She had no idea what to do with that. It was... Well, she wasn't going to disagree: the whole thing was bloody stupid. But that was the way of adolescent feuds, wasn't it? She and her friends hadn't been any better at that age.

She couldn't say they'd get over it, of course — sometimes friendships just fell apart. Honestly, from the admittedly little she knew of them, she wasn't sure why Granger was friends with the other two anyway. They didn't seem to have a whole lot in common. Perhaps the collapse of their relationship was simply inevitable. Giving Granger false hope they could mend their differences wasn't doing her a service.

Perhaps it would be better to not let herself be distracted, to not comment on that at all. Yes. "So, because of that, you can't go to Hogsmeade."

Granger let out a long, slightly shaky sigh. She didn't lift her head, speaking into her hands, her voice slightly muffled. "Harry can't go at all, and I can't go with Ron, not now. And I just— With everyone going with their friends or dates or whatever, I just felt— It just seems like it'd be a little...pathetic. To go alone."

 _And loitering in your professor's office all day would be_ _ **less**_ _pathetic, of course._ Ashe bit back the sarcastic comment — that would be less than helpful. "I don't think there's anything particularly pathetic about that. I mean, if _you_ feel you need company to properly enjoy yourself, that's one thing. But, I guess I'm trying to say, it's not helpful to judge this sort of thing based on what you think you _should_ do, or want. If that makes sense."

"I don't, though." Granger dropped her hands, shooting Ashe a defensive look just short of a glare. But it only lasted a second, quickly collapsing into a frown, her eyes dropping to her knees. "I don't _think_ I do."

"It's normal for people to judge themselves based on what they think others would think, especially around your age. It takes a long time to grow out of it. Some people never do." Ashe paused, let Granger process that for a moment. "But, if you feel you _must_ do this sort of thing with someone, I'm sure Potter and Weasley aren't your only options."

Granger's normally pleasant face twisted into a scowl. "The rest of my housemates are a bit..." Her mouth worked silently for a moment, struggling for the words.

Gryffindor-ish. The word she was looking for was Gryffindor-ish. Ashe personally didn't put any stock in this Sorting nonsense, but she did have to admit the Gryffindor alumni she'd met she could tolerate socially were scant. They did tend to be a bit irritating. "Isn't there anyone outside of Gryffindor you talk to?"

The girl shifted in her seat, uncomfortable. "Not really."

Ashe bit back a sigh. This Sorting nonsense, honestly. "That's far too common, I feel. Honestly, I don't understand this Sorting thing. It's ridiculous, that Hogwarts alumni take all this so seriously."

Brow twisting into a frown, Granger looked back up to stare at her. Confusion, by the look of it. "Was it different when you were here, Professor? That couldn't have been that long ago..."

"Oh, I didn't go to Hogwarts."

Granger blinked. "Really?"

"Really. My family taught me through OWLs while I was in primary and secondary. I did my Proficiencies, which are equivalent to NEWTs, at Beauxbatons, while also attending Aix-Marseille University. I worked on my Mastery through the Academy in na Caoimhe, off and on when I was at Oxford. I didn't attend Hogwarts, and I was never Sorted. I still think the whole thing is very silly."

For a long moment, Granger just stared at her, eyes wide and unblinking. "You can do that? Go to normal school while studying magic."

Ashe shrugged. "You _can_ , of course, but it's pretty rare. More common among the children of muggleborns, but unusual even then. All the misters go through O-levels, but we also all homeschool magic, which isn't an option for most people, and very few of us bother going to university. Though, you might want to consider keeping up on your studies, enough to take A-levels later. In case you decide you want to go to university after graduating from Hogwarts, it'll be very helpful. These days, a more modern understanding of science is essential in many theoretical fields. Few do it, especially in Britain, but with a mind like yours I'd consider at least keeping your options open.

"But, back to the point. You might want to try talking to people outside of Gryffindor. Susan Bones or Daphne Greengrass, maybe."

Her lip twisting with doubt, Granger said, "Daphne's a Slytherin."

Ashe smirked, just a little. "I think I've already said I find the Sorting thing silly. If you're worried about the whole blood purity thing, don't be. I've hardly spoken to Daphne, but her mother's a colleague — we wrote a book together once, in fact. I'm confident it won't be a problem. Or Lisa Turpin, you might like Lisa Turpin.

"This opinion is based entirely on having read your essays and the handful of conversations I've had with all of you, so take it with a grain of salt, but I'd start with those three. If they don't work out, there's plenty of other kids here. At the very least, you'd have someone to talk to while waiting for these boys of yours to stop being so stupid. And if you can't, well—" Ashe gave a light shrug, a soft smile. "—my door's always open."

Granger smiled back, something thin and shaky, less than certain, but all the more honest for it. "Thank you, Professor."

She felt her smile tilt a little. "Just, try not to monopolize my office hours too much, all right? I do have other students who might need me now and again, you know."

"Oh!" Abruptly, Granger jumped to her feet, her cheeks flaring pink. "I'm sorry! I wasn't thinking, I just—"

"It's fine, Miss Granger, I was just teasing. I'm amazed it took me this long. You see, I'm not usually this nice — I'm really quite a terror most of the time."

A fraction of the usual light going back into her eyes, despite the embarrassment still warming her cheeks, Granger laughed.

* * *

__

_February_

* * *

The half-completed proof in front of her blurring into meaninglessness, Hermione's face sank into a heavy frown. She hadn't looked up from her corner, but she didn't need to to know what was going on — her housemates weren't being at all quiet in their admiration of that damn broomstick. The professors must have cleared it.

Which, if she were honest, didn't make her feel any better. They still had no explanation for where the thing had come from. She'd done a little research, and exactly how much a Firebolt ran depended on who was buying it. Professional quidditch teams got a significant discount, likely because the company considered it good advertising, and government security forces got an even better one. Private citizens, though, could expect to pay roughly a hundred fifty galleons, equivalent to _thirty-seven thousand pounds_. That was a _lot_ of money — considering how much smaller the magical economy was, it was even more ludicrous than it sounded.

People didn't just throw around that kind of money. Supposedly, Harry didn't have any family left, hadn't any friends who could have sent it to him. He did have admirers, sure, mostly people who had never even met him before. How seriously people took that Boy-Who-Lived thing still baffled her. But anyway, sending a bloody Firebolt would still be absurd even for one of his ridiculous fans. Even if they'd been leery to leave a name, they _certainly_ would have included a note of some kind. But no, nothing. Nothing at all.

That it was cursed seemed the most reasonable assumption, really.

Though, now, Hermione was starting to suspect her guess Black had sent it was correct, but she had the reason wrong. It wasn't until after Christmas that Harry had told her about his irresponsible adventure in Hogsmeade, where he'd overheard the story of Black's supposed crimes. Harry had been absolutely convinced, had a simmering hatred of Black going that she found a little scary, but the whole thing had smelled fishy to Hermione.

Especially the little tidbit that, according to Harry's recollection of the conversation, Black had _voluntarily handed Harry over_ to Hagrid. If Black was as evil as everyone said he was, why didn't he just kill them both right then? Hagrid was huge, but a Dark wizard could put him down in seconds, it wasn't a question. If Black really had meant Harry harm, it didn't make any sense.

So she'd done some research.

Turns out, Black had never had a trial — there hadn't even been one of the smaller-scale tribunals or hearings they did for most crimes. Apparently, the DLE could just chuck people in Azkaban for the rest of their natural lives with absolutely no formal legal process at all. As terrifying as that was, that wasn't even the worst part. They said his curse had blown up the entire street (natural gas line, most likely), killing a dozen muggles and one Peter Pettigrew, another friend of the Potters. The muggles' bodies had been burned and broken, all they'd found of Pettigrew his torn robes and a bloody finger.

Torn robes. And a bloody finger.

After an _explosion_.

Sometimes, Hermione wondered if she would ever get over how completely idiotic mages could be. _Explosions didn't work like that_. They just didn't. If Pettigrew had _actually_ been hit with that curse and the subsequent gas fire, his robes should be completely burned away, any remains they found dried and blackened. Finding _only_ a finger? A _whole_ finger, with _blood on it?_

Honestly, it was so obvious. Turned out it wasn't just Hogwarts, the Ministry was filled with morons too.

She had a feeling Sirius Black, as absurd as it sounded, was _innocent_. (Making it all the more horrifying that he'd been locked away without due process to be psychologically tortured by soul-sucking demons for the rest of his life, but that wasn't the point right now.) The goblins cared little for the Ministry, she wouldn't be surprised if he had full access to the Black fortune (which was, apparently, considerable). Actually _ordering_ the broom would have been more tricky, but she wouldn't put anything past the first ever Azkaban escapee. It was hardly a stretch of the imagination Black might have decided to send his godson a Christmas gift, even while on the run. Risky, but he _had_ been a Gryffindor.

After she'd mostly convinced herself of Black's innocence, she'd _tried_ to talk to Harry, but he refused to listen to a word of it. Harry was quite determined to hate the man. Though, it probably didn't help that she hadn't changed her mind about having the professors check the broom for curses — Black's possible innocence had no bearing on the inherent suspiciousness of such an expensive gift being sent anonymously. If anything, it had just made Harry even more angry with her. These days, he shut her out as solidly as Ron did.

Hermione was growing quite tired of their childish tantrums. She'd been a little offended when Babbling, in a way that suggested it'd just slipped out, had asked why she bothered trying to repair her friendship with them at all, but now she had to wonder if her new favorite professor didn't have a point. She was right about so much else, after all, it had maybe been a little silly to dismiss the thought out of hand.

At least they couldn't badger her into helping with ( _i.e._ writing) their essays if they weren't speaking to her. That was one less annoyance to deal with, she guessed.

(It was easier to pretend she didn't miss them if she only thought about the annoying things they did. Did it count as lying to herself if she was fully aware she was doing it?)

But anyway, back to the point, that the mysterious Firebolt wasn't cursed made her feel even more certain it had been sent by a perfectly innocent Sirius Black. Which did _not_ make her feel any better. Instead, a vague sort of anxiety settled over her, setting her fingers to twitching and her scalp to itching.

They'd sentenced an innocent man to a lifetime of horrible psychological torture without even a façade of due process. It was horrifying.

It was infuriating.

After unending minutes of what seemed like most of Gryffindor fawning over the Firebolt, with a degree of awe that would be more appropriate if they were handling a sacred relic of some kind, the crowd finally started to disperse. Hermione didn't have to look up to know Harry was moving toward her — silence rippled across the common room, their housemates stilling to watch the fireworks.

She tried to keep the glare off her face, but she probably wasn't doing a very good job.

"I got it back." There was a shade of smugness on his voice, but it was _barely_ there — Harry was _trying_ to be politic, at least. She glanced up, taking in the bright grin on his face, how he was holding it out to her, as though expecting her to go mad over the damn thing like everyone else. A fair portion of her irritation faded away. There wasn't much that actually made Harry happy, it was difficult to keep up her sour mood faced with a look like that.

"See, Hermione? There wasn't anything wrong with it!" The smugness on Ron's voice was _far_ more obvious, practically taunting.

And the irritation was back. "But there _might_ have been!" Hermione winced — there was no use arguing the point. They hadn't been willing to listen to her before, now that the staff have declared it safe they were even less likely to. "At least now we know."

"Yeah, I suppose so." Harry was obviously humoring her, but at least he was trying. "Anyway, I should go put this upstairs—"

"I'll take it! I've got to give Scabbers his tonic." Ron took the Firebolt, holding it gingerly across both hands, and slowly wandered away, eyes unmoving from the overpriced stick of wood he bore, every inch of him radiating with awe.

Hermione felt her lip curl into a sneer. This wasn't new, Ron had always had a ridiculous obsession for anything quidditch-related, but combined with his usual over-attentiveness to the expensiveness of a thing, she somehow found it even more pitiful. It was just so...shallow. She realized Ron's family was...disadvantaged, to put it gently, but she would think that should make him _less_ conscious of that sort of social posturing, not more.

Okay, she wasn't being entirely fair. Other people didn't usually see this sort of thing. Her family was comfortably middle class — upper-middle class, really — so she couldn't _really_ understand what it was like to be...well, not. Intellectually, sure, but understanding the _fact_ of something wasn't the same as understanding the _feeling_ of it.

And it wasn't really fair for other reasons. Her parents had money, but they didn't spend it on fancy things. Dad had told her, for as long as she could remember, to ask herself _why_ she wanted something, and if she really thought that was a good enough of a reason. Her parents didn't want fancy things. They'd rather _go_ interesting places, _do_ interesting things. Their home and everything in it was all comparatively modest for their means, she'd noticed comparing against their colleagues over the years — except the library, books justified themselves. They just didn't consider it a priority.

Hermione had absorbed their attitude about such things over the years, but Ron hadn't the same influence. It'd be silly to expect him to care as little about fancy things as she did.

"Can I sit down, then?"

Part of her wanted to say no — the broom being clean didn't make it so the argument hadn't happened, things hadn't been said. That he and Ron hadn't just avoided her for weeks. But only a small part of her. "I suppose so." She doubted Harry would notice how she'd just repeated his own dismissive words back at him, but she did it anyway. Reaching to the chair next to her, she lifted her Runes work, moved it to the other side of the table. She glanced back over her proof before setting her quill aside. No point trying, she couldn't do maths and keep up a conversation at the same time.

Harry sat, but said nothing for a short while, eyes wandering over the table. The whole thing was almost buried in textbooks and notebooks and parchment, both loose and bundled into charmed folders, she guessed there was a lot to look at. "How are you getting through all this?"

"Oh, you know—" — _time travel._ "—organization and hard work." It wasn't difficult at all, actually. With how things had picked up in spring term, she'd needed to increase the days she repeated entirely from one to two, and then a few weeks later to three. It made juggling her schedule a _little_ complicated, but she was keeping up, and even getting enough sleep.

(It was possible her parents had lectured at her about that when she'd informed them she was using a time machine to get to her classes. After the fascinated questions about _bloody time travel_ , anyway, they _were_ her parents.)

"Why don't you just drop a couple subjects?"

Hermione let out a huff. "I'm fine, Harry." Just because _some_ people hadn't an ounce of intellectual curiosity...

"Arithmancy looks terrible." Harry had picked up one of her element tables, giving the dense lines of numbers and symbols a horrified look.

"It's quite fascinating, really. You know we start _inventing our own spells_ next year? There's no way I'm dropping Arithmancy, or Runes." Though, she was thinking of dropping Divination for next year, and maybe Muggle Studies or Care. She would drop all of them — they were just so damn tedious and pointless — but she wanted to make sure she still had at least one schedule conflict. Her Time Turner was far too useful, she didn't want to give it up.

"I'm just a little worried, okay. I mean, every week you have all this—"

"Oh, this isn't for _one week!_ This is all my work for the whole year. I keep all my notes and marked essays and everything, they can be quite useful later. For reference, you know."

By the look on Harry's face, he _really_ didn't. "Still, it just seems..."

"I'm fine, Harry, really." She shot him a sly smile. "Just don't expect me to go back to writing your essays for you. I have so many of my own, you see."

He flinched a little, but returned her smile easily enough. "I was never _that_ bad." True, Harry wasn't as bad as Ron, but she didn't think _writing your essays for you_ was that much of an exaggeration. "I've been doing everything for myself the whole year, though, and I'm doing fine. Way better than Ron, anyway."

 _Better than Ron_ was a very low benchmark — honestly, Hermione wasn't certain how he'd passed their first-year exams. Harry usually did well in exams, at least, but not so much usual coursework. "How have your marks been?"

"Es and As, mostly. Low in Herbology and Potions, high in Charms and Defense. I get Os in those sometimes, actually."

It took Hermione a second to find her voice — excluding practical exams, she didn't think she'd _ever_ seen Harry get an Outstanding in anything. "Oh, Harry, that's _great!_ I've always thought you were brilliant, when you put your mind to it."

Something dark crossed his face, but it was gone so quickly she wasn't certain it'd even been there. "Yeah, I... You're right, it's just, it's complicated."

"I don't think any less of you for it, Harry. I know you have a lot on your mind all the time. I'm just so glad you're—"

Hermione broke off with a start, turning toward the boys' stairs. There had been a sudden, strangled yell, Ron's voice. Harry had popped to his feet, wand appearing in his hand, but Ron started storming down the stairs before he could move, his arms full with...his bedsheets, of all things. What on earth...

"LOOK!" Hermione winced, the shouted word pounding painfully at her ears. Ron ran right up to the table, holding the bundle of cloth up to her, shaking it in her face, far too close, she could barely see a thing. "LOOK! SCABBERS!"

"Ron, get that out of my—" She tried to push the stuff away, but he just moved it to the side, then right back in her face. She caught a flash of color against the pale sheets, a splatter of brownish-red. A _small_ splash of brownish-red, a few tiny drops.

Even in the middle of being screamed at, Hermione's brain caught at the observation, started sprinting ahead.

"BLOOD! HE'S GONE! AND YOU KNOW WHAT WAS ON THE FLOOR?!" Ron didn't wait for Hermione to respond, slammed something down onto her Arithmancy work.

Long hairs, a bright orange-ish brown. No, fur. Crookshanks.

Only half paying attention to her surroundings, her thoughts kept running ahead.

"HE'S GONE! THAT MONSTER OF YOURS—"

"Ron, wait a—"

"NO, HARRY! I KEPT TELLING HER TO CONTROL THAT BEAST, BUT SHE WOULDN'T—"

The frown creasing her forehead so hard it almost hurt, Hermione said, "You didn't find anything else?"

"—SCABBERS IS DEAD, AND IT'S ALL HER—"

"Ron!" He cut off at her raised voice, but his face just got redder, the white of his eyes almost seeming to glow in contrast. "You looked under all the beds for him, right?"

"DON'T TRY TO SLITHER OUT OF IT, THAT BLOODY CAT—"

"Yes, yes! You hate Crookshanks, I get it! _Think_ for a second, Ron. Cats don't eat the bones, they should still be there! But you didn't find anything—"

"THE BEAST DRAGGED HIM OFF—"

"Scabbers should still be _somewhere_ , Ron, somewhere in the tower! Where is he, then?"

"I DON'T KNOW! IT DOESN'T MATTER, YOU—"

"Ron, it _does_ matter." Hermione glanced at Harry quick. He was staring at the hair on the table in front of her, his face drawn, almost exhausted. Clearly, he wasn't going to be any help. "The hair means nothing, it could have been there since Christmas, and the blood, if Crookshanks had caught him in the bed there should be far more blood than that." She'd watched Crookshanks catch a mouse before. It had gotten...messy. He _did_ lick up the blood, but cloth was absorbent, there should be more than that.

"THEN WHERE DO _YOU_ THINK THE BLOOD CAME FROM, THEN, IF YOU'RE SO BLOODY SMART?!"

She raised a single eyebrow at him. "I don't know. Did you cut yourself or something?"

That, as it turned out, was the _wrong_ thing to say.

* * *

"Did you kill that dumb rat, Crookshanks?"

He glared back up at her with those brilliant orange eyes, a low growl rumbling through him into her hand. She could almost feel the offended pride wafting into the air.

"I thought not. Do you think one of the other cats got it?"

That yowl was _definitely_ offended pride.

"Oh, I know, sweetie. So...what happened to it, then?"

Crookshanks just stared back at her, no answers to offer.

Not that Hermione could speak Kneazle anyway.

* * *

__

_March_

* * *

Hermione took a couple extra circuits around the fourth floor, working up the nerve to carry out her little plot.

If someone had thought to ask, Hermione would have claimed she wasn't a naturally devious person, but an honest one who had been thrust into situations where deviousness was called for. Before Hogwarts, she would never have _thought_ of the things she'd had to do here, even all the way back in first term first year. Some part of her, some remnant of the proper good little girl she'd once been, looked at the things she'd done and was completely horrified.

She'd broken curfew, like a hundred school rules, even a couple _laws_. She'd lied to professors, but much worse than that, _she'd set one on fire_. And that was just first year!

Harry and Ron were clearly a terrible influence.

Regardless of how often she found herself doing dishonest things these days, she wasn't comfortable doing it. Working up the nerve to lie to Professor Babbling was even harder than she'd thought it would be. She _liked_ Babbling, she was her favorite professor now. If Babbling were to find out about it, she might...

Well, Hermione didn't know what she might, but the thought put an awful squirming of guilt in her stomach. She hated it.

With a last girding breath, Hermione knocked on the frame of the open door, and stepped into Professor Babbling's office. It was almost as interesting as the Runes classroom, if a little more mundane. There was far less enchanting done everywhere, for one thing, without the somewhat disconcerting omnidirectional light and unnaturally soft floors and furniture. It mostly looked like any other professor's office, really. There were a few peculiar artefacts displayed here and there, probably gifts from students, and of course bookshelves one after another after another. She'd noticed, perusing through the titles, that Babbling's collection was in multiple languages, and a significant number of them were muggle-printed books. The muggle ones bore titles concerning linguistics and history — which made sense, given the diplomas in those subjects from Aix-Marseilles and Oxford hanging on the wall.

As far as she knew, Babbling was the only Hogwarts professor who had any nonmagical education at all. It was kind of neat.

"Hello again, Miss Granger." Babbling was at her desk, reading a book with muggle-looking binding. As usual, she was wearing perfectly ordinary jumper and jeans and, not so usual, a delicate silverish pair of reading glasses — she'd mentioned to Hermione she was slightly farsighted, she only needed them when enchanting or reading a book with especially small print. (And Hermione's essays, apparently her hand was tiny enough.) She pulled the glasses from her face, using them to point at the seat across from her. "What brings you to my office today? On another Hogsmeade weekend, at that."

Hermione winced — she'd known it was a Hogsmeade weekend, of course, that was part of why she'd decided to go today. There wouldn't be anyone around to ask awkward questions about what she was doing, after all. But, given some of their previous conversations, she wasn't entirely surprised Babbling would ask. Pushing the door closed behind her, she said, "I did _almost_ end up going, but my friends said they have other plans." She sounded a little defensive, even to her own ears.

She'd almost been relieved when Daphne had said she couldn't go, since she'd almost certainly bring along Tracey and Blaise too. Going with the Slytherins hadn't been her first choice — they were at the very least friendly acquaintances by now, but they could be a bit...much. She wasn't saying she had a particular issue with them, they were perfectly fine. In moderation.

She _had_ asked Susan if she wanted to go first, but she also had other plans. She'd been really strange about it, actually. Hermione would think she'd had _date_ plans or something, but she was certain she'd seen Susan leave with Hannah. If Susan weren't such a pathological Hufflepuff, she'd almost think she was just trying to avoid her.

Watching Hermione slip into one of the chairs with a thin smile, Babbling said, "I suppose there wouldn't be any point to suggesting you _could_ just go by yourself."

"I mean, I _could_ , but it just seems like it'd be kind of...boring." Having no one to talk to sitting by herself with a book was one thing; having no one to talk to while wandering around a tiny mountain village was something quite else. "So, I figured you'd be free, with everyone else off at Hogsmeade, and I had something I've been wondering about lately."

A bright smirk stretched its way across Babbling's face. "Just the one thing, is it?"

With something of a sheepish smile, Hermione shrugged. "Well, one particular thing I thought I would ask you about, anyway."

"Go ahead, then."

"I was reading about the more advanced enchantments and wards, and it's obvious that many applications require the use of very complex referents. Say, enchantments to detect certain sorts of spell residue, or wards keyed to specific people. In some cases, these signatures I would feel are too general to, just, put the arithmancy for a spell in as a referent — a lot of these things detect a _class_ of spells, not a specific one. And, obviously you can't write a string that isolates a particular individual, and even if you could, you'd need to carve in the new string each time you key someone into the wards, which obviously isn't done. The texts I've been reading weren't technical, so exactly how this is done wasn't explained. I was just wondering how that problem was solved."

As was usual when Hermione asked an intelligent question, Babbling was quite nearly grinning, eyes bright with approval. (Which, she had to admit, was a bit refreshing — most of the other Hogwarts professors didn't really appreciate off-topic questions.) "In point of fact, that problem was never solved. You're correct: these referents _are_ too complex to script in proper runes. Our predecessors found a workaround instead. The more complex referents simply aren't scripted at all."

Hermione blinked. "...What?"

Her smile turning into something more like a smirk, Babbling leaned back a little, reaching to fiddle with one of the drawers worked into her desk. "As I recall, the Transfiguration and Potions curricula here do very little with physical alchemy and geomancy, or what would be called in the muggle world materials science."

"Oh, well, no..." There was a _little_ bit that came up, if she understood what Babbling was talking about correctly. In early magic theory classes, back in first and second year, the basic magical properties of some materials _had_ come up — mostly, which metals worked as insulators, and exactly how much energy organic materials (like the human body) could tolerate before bursting into flames. The sort of thing that was important to know before getting too deep into the practical use of magic. But other than that, nothing much, really.

"I would think not — it's a rather new discipline, formalised long after the subjects at Hogwarts were defined. But, even if we didn't understand how exactly it works until comparatively recently, certain applications have been being exploited for thousands of years. The answer to your question, Miss Granger..." Babbling's hand retreated from the drawer, rising to hold something up in front of her smirking face. "...is this."

It was a gemstone, about an inch and a half long, cut into a sort of rectangular prism sort of thing — Hermione hadn't the language to describe the shape perfectly. There was a streak of a pale pink shot through it, but was otherwise clear, if slightly smokey. "Is that quartz?"

"It is." Babbling set the little piece of rock crystal on her desk, meeting the surface with a high tapping noise. "Any translucent, non-metallic crystal will do, so long as impurities of certain metals, particularly iron or lead, are low enough. Silicate minerals are preferred, so you'll likely find quartz used more than anything else, seeing as it is the second most abundant mineral on Earth."

Hermione nearly asked whether that meant gemstones with aluminium in them — rubies, sapphires, topaz — were unacceptable, before remembering mages didn't consider aluminium a metal. It was hard to keep that sort of thing straight sometimes. "Okay. And what are these crystals used for, exactly?"

The following explanation went on for some minutes, bouncing between materials science and arithmancy and theoretical alchemy and practical enchanting. Essentially, many non-metallic crystals could be used as...well, a magical battery was what it sounded like to Hermione. Crystals could hold magic, yes, but not just undifferentiated energy — the particular shape of the magic, for lack of a better term, could be preserved as well. A very long time ago, a set of charms had been designed to create a kind of magical image, which wards or enchantments could use to identify the real life object or spell the image corresponded to, assuming it was within range. Store the image in a bit of crystal, stick the crystal into the object being enchanted, and carve the script identifying the referent around it, piece of cake.

Well, no, it was actually far more complicated than that made it sound. For one thing, virtually every crystal did have defects, which caused the image to gradually decay; most modern wards had a script that automatically renewed them every year or so for that reason. The scripting to make sure the proper referent was attached to the proper image was complex, and could easily lead to catastrophic errors. (There were reasons wardcrafters and cursebreakers were some of the more highly-trained and highly-paid professionals in the magical world.) Not to mention, in its simplest form, an individual crystal would be needed for each referent — many larger ward systems could expect to need to key in dozens or even _hundreds_ of individual people, which quickly led to serious practical difficulties in getting the whole thing to work.

The Hogwarts wards, as an example, used a column of tightly-packed, miniscule, alchemically-created diamonds, _thousands_ of them, stitched together with a complex network of aluminium filaments, themselves carved with runes so fine they were practically microscopic, divided into different regions by thin sheets of silver (probably the most effective magical insulator). Each of the tiny diamonds held one image or another, from magical signatures of individual professors or students, generalised images to identify various magical creatures and natural phenomena, and elements from a long list of dangerous spell classes. To this day, experts still debated how exactly the scripting in this huge, absurdly intricate referent matrix worked, and the method had never been successfully reproduced. Which was really not surprising: there were apparently runes worked into those sheets of silver, meaning they must be enchanted _somehow_ to do _something_ , despite the fact that nobody could figure out exactly what it all accomplished, and that enchanting silver was supposed to be _impossible_.

Ravenclaw and Slytherin hadn't been considered unparalleled geniuses in their day for no good reason, after all.

But, the principle wasn't that difficult to wrap her head around. The particular application she wanted it for was really quite simple. All she needed to know now was where to find the spell she would need — Babbling was accommodating enough to name a book that would do. And that was that, Hermione had what she'd come for.

She tried to ignore the squirming of guilt in her stomach.

"So, are you going to tell me, or do I have to ask?"

Hermione blinked — that was a rather abrupt change of subject. She wasn't even entirely certain what the Professor was talking about. Couldn't be what she wanted to know about all this for, asking after random things wasn't at all out of character for her. "Erm... Tell you what?"

Sometimes, Babbling would get this peculiar expression, at once an amused, self-satisfied smirk, but also with shades of discomfort, of...awkwardness. It was a bit odd, Hermione still wasn't certain how to read that. "Once again, here you are monopolising my office hours, when you could be in Hogsmeade. Have you been out to the village at all yet?"

"Oh." For a few seconds, Hermione just stared back at Babbling, blankly taking in that peculiar uneasy smirk of hers. "No? I mean, I _did_ ask Susan and Daphne, but they both had other plans, apparently. Which is fine, I always have other things I could be doing. Having no one to talk to while sitting with a book is far less boring than walking around the village would be. At least, so I assume."

"Honestly, I'm surprised your insatiable curiosity hasn't dragged you out there yet."

"It will eventually," she said, shrugging a little. She was curious, yes, but, from what she'd heard, there didn't really sound like there was that much to _do_ in Hogsmeade. Especially going alone. Babbling kept making a big deal about this, had brought it up occasionally ever since Hallowe'en, which was honestly quite silly, she thought.

Babbling let a slow sigh out through her nose. For what felt like a minute, but was surely much less, she just watched Hermione, somewhat absently, eyes not seeming to be quite properly focused on her. Eventually, she twitched into motion, the moment of unnatural stillness broken as she reached to the side, tapped a rune worked into her desk. One of those weird magic hologram things Babbling liked so much sparked into existence, the face of a clock. (A muggle-style clock, but that wasn't a surprise by this point.) Another tap had it fading away, Babbling released another sigh. "Come on, then."

"What?"

But the Professor didn't pause to answer her question, she was already on her feet. She patted absently at her pockets for a moment — Babbling was, as usual, wearing jeans — before walking off to the door. Holding it open, she turned back to Hermione, eyebrows cocked. "Are you coming or not?"

Hermione jumped, pushed herself to her feet to stumble after her. As soon as she was out in the hall, Babbling shut the door again, pulled out her wand to conjure a sheet of paper, a couple lines of text already printed across it. She stuck it to the door with another quick charm, her arm retreating enough a moment after for Hermione to read it.

It said she was out to lunch, that she would be back by three at the latest.

...What the hell.

Hermione was distracted enough by the note that she didn't even notice Babbling had gone until she heard another door open. Partway down the hall, Babbling had stopped at another professor's office — Vector's, Hermione knew, they and Flitwick were the only ones who had their offices here. While Hermione slowly trailed after her, out of a lack of anything better to do, the two professors, who happened to be her favourite people on staff here, started talking...

...in German. At least, Hermione _thought_ it was German — it sounded vaguely German-ish, a recogniseable word sticking out here and there, but Hermione didn't actually speak German, so she couldn't be certain. Those recogniseable words weren't often or helpful enough for Hermione to figure out what they were talking about but, after a few times back and forth, she got the odd feeling Vector was making fun of Babbling somehow. She couldn't guess what it was about, but the surly glare on Babbling's face, Vector's grin, the playful, smug tone on her voice, it was pretty obvious.

"No," Vector said, abruptly switching to English, "you two will just have to have your fun without me." She turned her sharp grin on Hermione, looking somehow far too amused with herself. (Though, Hermione really couldn't say what was so funny.) "Give Ashe here a hard time for me, won't you, Miss Granger?"

"I... What are we talking about?"

But before Hermione had even gotten the whole question out, the door was already slamming closed. The sound of Vector giggling to herself was muffled, but clear enough to tell what it was.

"That girl, honestly." Babbling was glaring at the door, fingers of one hand tapping at her hip. "Someday, she's going to annoy the wrong person, and it's going to come around and bite her in the arse."

"Er..." There was far too much there that Hermione had _no idea_ how to respond to. Professors were usually professional enough to not say that sort of thing about each other in front of their students — McGonagall had to restrain herself talking about Trelawney sometimes, that was as close as anyone got. And, well, calling Vector _that girl_ as though she weren't an... Well, okay, to be fair, she was _barely_ an adult, only, what, twenty-two or twenty-three, something like that. With how long mages lived, she was practically still a child.

No matter how very _weird_ it was for Hermione to think that of her Arithmancy professor.

Babbling let out another sigh, shaking her head to herself. "Come on, then."

፠

"But never mind that, what have you gotten up to today?" Daphne seemed strangely uncomfortable, for Daphne. Like many of the other purebloods from magical Britain's noble families, she always was altogether too calm and composed for a child her age — in Daphne's case exceptionally so, without the little slips in the façade most of the others showed now and again.

Of course, that was fair. When Daphne had said no, she couldn't go in to Hogsmeade with Hermione today, she _hadn't_ said it was because there had been some kind of family emergency, and she'd be home for most of the day. One of her uncles was unwell, apparently, she'd been rather cagey on the details. Not that Hermione was bothered by that, it really wasn't her business.

Hermione leaned back in her chair with a huff. "Oh, nothing particularly interesting. I did end up going to Hogsmeade for lunch, but I was in the library most of the rest of the day." Doing homework in the morning, in the afternoon going about the necessary research for her little project. "Speaking of going into Hogsmeade, have you seen Susan? We were planning on meeting to talk about the Transfiguration essay tonight, but I didn't see her at at dinner."

There was a soft snort to her right. Tracey was sitting there, scratching away at their Arithmancy assignment, a smirk only partially hidden by her short, messy black hair. (Really, Tracey's hair was almost as bad as Harry's.)

Slowly, picking over her words with care, Daphne said, "I suspect Susan and Hannah may have been...delayed."

"They're probably huddled away somewhere in the village snogging each other stupid, she means."

Daphne let out a sigh, a few of the long, sunny blonde hairs framing her face fluttering with her breath. "Tracey..."

"What?" Tracey glanced up from her work to blink innocently over at her fellow Slytherin — patently _false_ innocence, even someone who'd never met Tracey before wouldn't buy that for a second.

"Hold on a second," Hermione said, her own voice sounding slightly distant to her own ears. Which, that was justified, she thought, she was... _confused_ , okay, she didn't... "Are you saying that...Susan and Hannah went to Hogsmeade _on a date?_ "

Tracey frowned at her, blinking. "Well, yeah. Didn't you know that?"

"Susan wasn't certain she wanted to tell you." Daphne sounded like she felt a little bad about that, guilty, but Hermione couldn't tell if it was sincere or not. That was the problem with Slytherins in general, and Daphne Greengrass in particular — Hermione could never be entirely certain they truly meant what they were saying. "It is only their first date, of course, Susan didn't want to make a fuss over it only for it to not go well."

" _Not go well_ — how much you wanna bet they're shagging right now?"

Daphne shot her a faintly exasperated look. " _Must_ you, Tracey?"

"I think you know the answer to that."

Letting out a soft sigh through her nose, Daphne's eyes tipped up to the ceiling of the library, only for a second. "Susan is aware of how...difficult muggle culture can be, about this sort of thing. She didn't want to risk bringing it up until she was certain she would need to."

"Oh." Daphne was talking around it, doing that face-saving thing purebloods liked to do, but that was more than direct enough for Hermione to figure out what she was saying: Susan hadn't wanted to tell Hermione she was going on a date with another girl because she was worried Hermione might have...some shade of homophobic reaction over it. In retrospect, that would explain why Susan had seemed so awkward when Hermione had asked if she had plans today.

Which hadn't been necessary, Hermione _wasn't_ freaking out about it, though she was... Was that normal, to mages? She meant, that Daphne made the point of saying _muggle_ culture could be weird about it implied as much, that mages didn't care about it the same way many non-magical people did. Hermione hadn't heard anything about that...but it wasn't the kind of thing that was likely to be explicitly explained in a book somewhere, was it?

She might as well ask. Daphne, being a pureblood witch from a noble family and all, was likely to know about this sort of thing, she was always open to answering Hermione's questions. (It was rather nice, actually having someone willing to _explain_ these cultural things that were new to her, Ron was always terrible about that.) "Is that...common? Same-sex couples, I mean."

"I suppose that depends on what you mean by _couples_. Most of the time, what people do in private together just isn't anyone else's business. Little flings between people while they're in school, married couples having paramours — with the permission of their spouse, of course — this is seen as normal, whatever the sexes of the people involved. When it comes to long-term relationships, where marriage and family and the like are concerned, that's a different story. Two people of the same sex cannot marry. You might occasionally see committed homosexual couples, but it is seen as...unusual, quite eccentric — though it isn't so strange among the commons, I suppose." Daphne's head tilted slightly, one pale eyebrow ticking up. "Why? Does Susan and Hannah being involved make you uncomfortable?"

"Oh, no!" It belatedly occurred to Hermione she hadn't actually made that clear at any point. "I mean, I didn't— I was just wondering, there are still a lot of these cultural differences that I haven't caught up on. There's a long history of many religions harshly condemning homosexuality, the people who care much about 'tradition' tend to be pretty bad about it. I've never... Well, my parents didn't raise me like that — those sort of attitudes I'm familiar with from the non-magical world are a part of why people here talking about 'tradition' sort of instinctively turns me off." Once she was done reassuring Daphne she wasn't going to be silly about this, the implication of something she'd said finally sunk in. "Wait, did you say gay people are expected to marry people of the opposite sex?"

Daphne frowned. "Um, is this a use of _gay_ I'm not familiar with?"

It took some effort for Hermione not to laugh. "Muggle slang. People who prefer the same sex."

For some reason, Daphne looked less than happy with that explanation, her lips quirking and her brows narrowing — it was almost like she was mildly offended by the term, which was just bloody strange. "I see. Anyway, to answer your question, yes, though it does vary. In the vast majority of cases, the head of the family will consider the person's input and preferences. If a person is so opposed to a proper marriage, they need not consent to one...though how accommodating the head of the family will be of that varies as well. It is not unusual for people with an exclusive preference for the same sex to find themselves in certain demanding careers, ones the time investment for which might be prohibitive to people with families to mind. Healers, cursebreakers, Obliviators, school teachers, that—"

" _Teachers_? In the magical world, gay people are encouraged to _become teachers_?" Not that she _cared_ about a professor's sexuality, that was just... _odd_. She meant, she just knew some people would throw a strop if they found out one of the teachers at the local school was gay, it was just such a strange thought...

"I wouldn't say _encouraged_ , precisely, but they are disproportionately represented. It's a difficult thing, teaching at a place like Hogwarts while raising a family — you might have noticed the only person currently on staff who's married is Madam Hooch." Hermione's mouth opened for a second before clicking closed again. No, she _hadn't_ noticed that, actually. "Not to say that's the reason for all of them, they have their own circumstances. Snape and Hagrid are both known to prefer women, and Pince was widowed back in Grindelwald's war. But some of them? Yes."

"Sinistra's pretty obvious," Tracey muttered.

"McGonagall had a fling with another female professor a few decades back, I heard."

"Have you _seen_ Lupin?"

Daphne shot Tracey an exasperated look, but didn't bother trying to chastise her. "There have always been rumours about Dumbledore, going all the way back to when he was a student himself."

"And Babbling, of course."

"Babbling?"

Now Daphne was shooting Hermione a look, though she wasn't quite certain how to read it. "Yes, Babbling prefers women."

Tracey snorted. "Shacked up with one of her classmates for half of her mastery study. Her girlfriend was a bloody Ingham, everybody talked about it — _still_ talk about it, really, Muirgheal Ingham hasn't married either. I heard a rumour she's living in London now with some muggle she's shagging, don't know if that's true or not."

"Must you be so crude?"

"No, I just like to."

It took a moment for it to click why Babbling's ex being a _bloody Ingham_ should be such a big deal — the Inghams were a Noble and Most Ancient House, one of the Seventeen Founders of the Wizengamot. (They were down to four now, the rest had died out.) The Seventeen Founders were considered, like, the nobility of the nobility, had prestige just a step higher than the rest of them. She supposed it made sense that the daughter of one of these families refusing a "proper" marriage and living with a woman should be a prime topic for gossip. Especially since Babbling was from a Mistwalker family (and not even one of the _respectable_ ones, like the Boneses or the Greengrasses). It'd be enough of a scandal without the gay angle, apparently at least part of the other kids' disdain for Ginny's friend Luna was due to a similar scandal a couple generations ago — her grandmother Sophianna Ollivander had eloped with a Lovegood, another MIstwalker family, it was a whole thing.

The mainline pureblood noble families didn't seem to think much of the Mistwalkers, which was...kind of odd. She meant, a lot of them claimed to care so much about magical blood, and the Mistwalkers were purebloods almost by definition — according to Babbling, Mistwalkers preferentially had children with other Mistwalkers, going back centuries now. In fact, Mistwalkers on the average probably had more consistently magical ancestry going back longer than most so-called 'purebloods', since before the Statute the magical nobility had regularly intermarried with non-magical noble families. And while they had abandoned a lot of it themselves, they had arguably retained more of the native pre-Roman Celtic culture than any other segment of British mages, so one would think, if they cared so much about 'tradition', the pureblood nobility would have at least _some_ respect for that.

Nobody she'd talked to about these things had said as much, but she was pretty sure she'd just nailed the reason why, in referencing how the pre-Statute magical noble families had intermarried with non-magical ones: the mainline purebloods' issue with the Mistwalkers was, Hermione suspected, one of class. For historical reasons, most of the Mistwalker families hadn't accumulated wealth over the centuries the same way many other pureblood families had. They tended to be rather poor, in fact. The major exceptions were the Boneses — the priesthood that had eventually been reorganised into the modern House of Bones had once been, essentially, the mages' state church, they'd had privileges the other Mistwalkers and even most noble families hadn't — and the Greengrasses — they'd been sort of an agricultural cult, they'd had contracts with growers magical and non-magical to use their rituals to ensure consistent and bountiful harvests, and they'd done quite well for themselves off of it — and these two, the most wealthy of the Mistwalker families, _just so happened_ to be the only two that had been raised to the nobility over the entire duration of the Wizengamot's existence, were the only two that were considered respectable by high society.

Hermione really shouldn't be surprised. It always came down to money, in the end — adding magic into the mix didn't change that.

"So, what did you think of Hogsmeade anyway?"

Startled out of her thoughts, it took a moment for Hermione to register Tracey's question. "It was fine, I guess. Didn't think it was that special, really."

"I wouldn't expect it to seem so," Daphne said, shrugging a little. "The history of the Valley being what it is, Hogsmeade is not much different from the culture at Hogwarts."

"I suppose that makes sense." For being a community isolated from the non-magical world for centuries, with unique cultural influences and bloody _magic_ on top of everything else, Hogsmeade hadn't actually struck her as all that foreign. A few odd things had jumped out at her, obviously, but more like quaint little village odd than anything. Hogsmeade always had been closely tied to Hogwarts — or, the other way around, technically, the village predated the school — so it made sense that, if Hermione had gotten used to Hogwarts, Hogsmeade wouldn't be that unfamiliar. "It was a lot like Charing, actually — I mean, one's in the middle of London and the other in the middle of nowhere, so there are aesthetic differences, but Diagon Alley and High Street felt very alike to me."

Daphne shrugged again. "Well, of course. Charing and Hogsmeade are both German towns." Anglicised British, she meant, the Mistwalkers tended to call the English-speaking magical (and muggle) people of the island Germans, for historical reasons. A lot of the more conservative segments of magical British society considered English a foreign language — and had fiercely opposed its adoption as the working language of the Wizengamot and the Ministry — which, there _was_ logic to that, it just seemed a little late to complain about it now.

There _were_ things Hermione could say about that little hint of chauvinism Daphne had just shown, but there was really no point to it. "Anyway, it was fine enough, I guess. Just dropped by a few shops on High Street — there's a second-hand bookstore there that looks rather promising, I'll have to check it out on my own sometime." As much as Babbling would surely understand getting distracted in a bookstore, it just hadn't seemed polite to let herself get carried away at the time. "Everyone talks about the Three Broomsticks, but it looked noisy and terrible, and pubs aren't really my thing, you know? Babbling knows this nice little café up by Violet Way, and that was quite nice — by the way, is there a reason all the streets in Hogsmeade are named after flowers? Babbling didn't know off the top of her head."

Her question was greeted with flat silence, both Slytherins blankly staring at her.

"What?"

Daphne and Tracey glanced at each other — they'd known each other since they'd been toddlers, Hermione swore these two could have a conversation without speaking a word. After a few seconds, Daphne said, slow and cautious, "You mean, _Professor_ Babbling."

"Yes? Are there other Babblings? I mean, _at Hogwarts_ , obviously." Like most of the Mistwalkers, Babblings didn't tend to go to Hogwarts — pretty much just the Boneses and the Greengrasses, and Luna Lovegood because she was being sponsored by the Ollivanders through her grandmother.

"Hey, give us a break, Granger," Tracey drawled, "it's not every day you see a professor and a student going to Hogsmeade together."

Hermione rolled her eyes — now that she was aware of...Babbling's preferences, it was obvious what they were thinking. "Don't be ridiculous, it wasn't like that. She'd been telling me I should go to Hogsmeade, see more of magical Britain and all that, ever since Hallowe'en, she just got frustrated with me and dragged me along." Babbling had needed to pick up some ink and a new pen anyway, it hadn't been going much out of her way to give Hermione a tour. As embarrassing as the whole thing had been.

"That's not what we're saying."

"That's not what _Daphne_ is saying."

Daphne shot Tracey a mild glare; Tracey, naturally, returned it with an unrepentant smirk. "Exactly why you were there doesn't matter so much, Hermione. People talk. Someone with Babbling's reputation being seen in a _nice little café_ with a female student is going to spark gossip, no matter how innocent it may have been."

...Oh. That was sort of a good point, she guessed. She was well aware how overactive and frequently salacious the gossip mill at Hogwarts could get — judging by the shite that got into the _Prophet_ sometimes, the country at large probably wasn't much better. "Well, nothing we can do about rumours, I suppose, but that's not going to get Babbling in trouble, is it? I mean, surely the Ministry couldn't believe she's actually doing anything illegal..." Not that Hermione had much confidence in the Ministry's competence, but, Babbling was just trying to be nice, if she actually got in trouble over something so stupid...

"What the hell do you mean, illegal?"

Hermione frowned at Tracey. "I thought that should be obvious..."

If anything, Tracey just looked faintly amused. "Just a guess here, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, if rumours do crop up about you two, they're gonna suggest you're a willing participant. You _do_ spend a lot of time hanging around her office, you know, talking about her all the time like her little fangirl."

She glared at Tracey, but felt her own cheeks warming, because she— Well, it _did_ sound bad when Tracey put it like _that_... "Yeah, but whether...I'm a _willing participant_ or not doesn't matter, does it?"

With a little sigh, Daphne said, "The age of consent in magical Britain is thirteen, Hermione."

Hermione's mouth opened to respond, then closed again. She hadn't known that. "Oh."

"If rumours _do_ crop up, and people _do_ take it seriously, the worst consequences Babbling will have to suffer will be career-related. It's not like the Aurors are going to come busting down her door or anything."

Well, that was...reassuring. Sort of. "I still don't want to accidentally ruin her career, either. I mean, it's not even like that, she hasn't done any— This is stupid."

"Just keep it in mind, Hermione," Daphne said, sounding a bit exasperated, but at least a _little_ sympathetic. "You can't stop people from gossiping, but you can at least manage the material they have to work with. I'm not saying you should avoid Babbling entirely. I'm only saying, at least try to keep in mind how things might look from the outside, and do your best to prevent any...unfortunate misunderstandings."

"Right, okay. I didn't... I didn't think of that." Of course she wouldn't have, she hadn't known Babbling was gay before...and even if she _had_ known, that she should be careful to not give people any reason to think she was _sleeping with her professor_ wouldn't have occurred to her anyway. She meant, _obviously_ , she was, like, _forty_ years older than her! Honestly...

Hermione sighed, rubbing at her face with both hands. She hoped the stupid gossips in the school didn't run away with this. Lavender was already _more_ than enough of a pain, she didn't want to have to deal with that kind of nonsense...

Though, even if her classmates did start teasing her about it, Hermione already knew it wasn't going to stop her from dropping by Babbling's during office hours. She was just too interesting, Hermione couldn't help it.

(She tried to ignore the niggling thought that, if she really _couldn't_ bring herself to stop hanging around Babbling, these hypothetical future gossips might kind of have a point..)

* * *

__

_April_

* * *

There was a sharp knock at the door. "Do you have a moment, Professor? It's important."

Ashe felt her own eyebrows twitch. It wasn't exactly out of the ordinary for a student to come to her with one "urgent" matter or another, at this particular time of the year — exams were coming up soon, she was constantly beset with OWL and NEWT students asking for tips on their projects or career advice or apprenticeship referrals and the like. So accustomed was she with the demands and anxieties of fifth- and seventh-years, she intentionally cut back on out-of-class assignments, to allow her more time to deal with these extra issues. The other three years had their own end-of-term projects, of course, but those wouldn't even be assigned until halfway through May. Her office hours had been almost entirely taken up by fifth- and seventh-years for a couple weeks now.

Unsurprisingly, the major exception was Hermione Granger — though even she'd cut back on her visits somewhat, revising for her own exams. (And perhaps out of respect for the upperclassmen, Ashe hadn't asked.) She really shouldn't be surprised to see the by-now familiar mane of bushy brown curls leaning around her door.

But the tension on her voice was new. And curious.

"Come on in, Miss Granger." Ashe stuck a broken quill between the pages of her book, set it aside. (If nothing else, cutting back on assignments for the kids meant she had far less marking to do.) Her reading glasses off and folded in hand, she pointed with them at one of the empty chairs. "So what do you have for me today?"

She noticed that Granger had closed the door behind her, which was odd, she usually didn't bother. She didn't take the offered chair either, standing a few steps away from her desk, looking uncharacteristically nervous, biting her lip and shifting foot to foot, fiddling with one of the clay tiles students were given to practise with. "I, ah, it's kind of...complicated, and I don't know where to start."

Ashe frowned — Granger seemed nervous, yes, but also...guilty? What the hell for? Holding in the urge to sigh, Ashe pushed herself to her feet, walked around her desk, and tugged at the tile in Granger's hands — presumably a private project of some kind and directly related to whatever she wanted to discuss. The girl resisted for a second, her fingers tightening and her lips twitching, but she let go. Propping herself against the front of her desk, Ashe turned it over.

There were symbols carved into the face — a blend of futhark and hieroglyphs, which was interesting, third-years didn't work with Egyptian at all. Somewhat off-centre, toward one of the corners, was a bit of quartz, fixed to the clay with copper wire, ringed with script identifying the determiner for...a tracking charm? Yes, that was definitely a tracking spell — technically a divination and not a charm, the difference was mostly semantic from an enchanter's perspective — though Ashe couldn't determine what it was meant to track without projecting the image she assumed was frozen in the reservoir. This could be used to find pretty much anything, assuming the target wasn't using spells to prevent it. Divinations were tricky like that.

Ashe fixed the girl, still shifting nervously, with a flat look. "So, I suppose when you came to me with questions about how enchanters handle more complex referents, that wasn't simply innocent curiosity."

Granger's cheeks pinked, her eyes tipping down to the floor. She clasped her hands, probably to stop herself from fidgeting. "No, I was already planning this. I'm sorry, Professor, I just...didn't know what to say."

"Don't fret over it, Miss Granger, I'm not annoyed." Amused more than anything, honestly — Granger could probably ask a professor _anything_ without rousing suspicion, they'd just assume she was too curious for her own good. Setting the amateur focus down on the desk next to her, she said, "It's good work, _very_ good for a third-year. What exactly were you trying to find?"

Granger was silent another long moment. She still wasn't meeting Ashe's eyes, shoulders hunching a little. "Ah, this is going to... I know this _sounds_ mad, okay, but bear with me, please."

It took some significant effort for Ashe not to smirk at the poor girl. "All right. Consider the benefit of the doubt granted."

"Thank you, Professor," Granger muttered, some small portion of her nervousness lifting away. "It's about... I've told you about Scabbers, Ron's pet rat, right."

"Yes?"

"See, it disappeared back in February, and... Ron found a few spots of blood on his sheets, blamed Crookshanks for it, he's barely talked to me since."

Yes, Granger had told her about this before. Ashe had held back the urge to say good riddance to bad rubbish — she'd never once spoken to Ronald Weasley, but the rest of the staff and Granger herself had given her _very_ little cause to have a charitable opinion of the boy. But Granger likely wouldn't have appreciated that, so she'd held her tongue. "I recall."

"I think..." Granger's cheeks pinked again, her weight shifting a little. "At the time, I'd thought it was... It didn't quite feel right. It sort of seemed like... I think Scabbers faked it."

For long seconds, Ashe was too dumbfounded to speak. She simply stared at the girl — her fingers fidgeting, staring at the floor and face flaming with embarrassment — trying to make sense of that little bit of absurdity. "You believe a _rat_ staged its own demise."

"I know what it sounds like, even I thought the idea's a little mad, but I've seen cats kill rats before, and there were only _a couple drops_ of blood on Ron's sheets, and he never did find Scabbers's remains anywhere, it's not like cats eat all the _bones_ or anything, and Crooks claimed he didn't kill it, I mean, I know a cat isn't exactly a reliable witness and it also sounds kind of insane to claim _my cat said he didn't do it_ , but he's part-Kneazle, you know, they're a lot smarter than normal cats, and there was something just _odd_ about the whole—"

"Breathe, Granger," Ashe said, holding up a hand to cut her off. She tried not to smile at the silly girl, but it was oddly difficult. "You don't have to explain yourself to me — believe it or not, I've had a seemingly mad idea myself now and again. I assume this focus is meant to find the dearly departed Scabbers."

Granger took in a long slow breath. She reached into her pocket.

And pulled out a rat.

A rather sickly, pathetic looking rat. It had the strung-out, flabby look of a creature that had lost too much weight too quickly, patches of fur missing here and there. Ashe recalled Granger had mentioned, ages ago now, that Weasley's rat had sickened over the summer, and...

Wait. "Is that...?"

Granger nodded. Pointing at one of its paws, "See, this missing toe here? Scabbers has been missing that toe ever since Percy got him about a decade ago now."

Ashe had been about to say something, but _that_ new piece of information stole the words from her mouth. "A decade."

"Yeah, Percy found it in the Weasleys' garden when he was a little kid. He would have been five or six or something, I'm not sure exactly."

...

Ashe snatched the rat out of Granger's hand, without really thinking about it, hardly even realised what she was doing.

Jumping, Granger said, "Hey, what— Is something—?"

"This is _not_ a bloody rat, Granger!" Ashe winced as Granger cringed away from her, pulled back to collect herself for a moment. She set the rat down on her desk next to Granger's tracker — hitting the thing with five different sleeping and stunning spells while she was at it. Granger presumably had it under _something_ , but she wasn't playing around with this. "I'm sorry, Miss Granger, I didn't mean to shout at you."

"It's okay," Granger muttered, sounding oddly small. "What do you mean, it's not a rat?"

"There are magical breeds of rat out there, but _very_ few of them live as long as a decade. And _none_ of them are intelligent enough to _fake their own deaths_."

"Oh." Granger stared at the rat, her teeth working at her lip again. "Then what is it?"

"Most likely? An animagus."

Her mouth dropping open in shock, Granger abruptly went _very_ pale.

"McGonagall should be in her office right now. Find her, tell her we've found a suspected animagus posing as a student's pet, and that I need her to perform an Homorphus Charm for me. If she's not in, Flitwick or Snape will also do." Unfortunately, Ashe hadn't the skill with human transfiguration to perform that kind of spell herself, and the castle's wards interfered with any of the messenger charms she could use to alert them herself. Granger would just have to suffer serving as her messenger this evening. Thankfully, Granger was treating this situation with all the seriousness it deserved — she went dashing out the door without a word of protest.

The entire time she was gone, Ashe stared at the motionless rat, hardly even blinking.

Granger returned after about five minutes or so, Minerva flushed and panting at her heels — apparently, Granger was taking this _so_ seriously she'd run the whole way, dragging Minerva along with her, which was sort of funny. Minerva leaned back against the door, one hand pressed over her chest, trying to control her breathing. "One moment. I'm not so...young as I used to be."

Ashe held in a scoff. Minerva couldn't be _that_ much older than Ashe — maybe twenty years or so, which was _hardly_ over the hill for a witch — she just dressed and acted beyond her years so it often didn't seem like it. Apparently she'd _always_ been like that, since she'd been Granger's age (overcompensating for her modest background, she assumed), but that didn't make it any less irritating. Unless she'd taken a pretty serious curse in the war Ashe didn't know about, there was no reason such a short run should trouble her so badly.

"Er, sorry Professor..."

"It's quite alright, Miss Granger. I understand..." Minerva cut off to breathe again. "I understand there's a suspicious rat?"

"Yes, Granger here captured what I suspect to be an animagus." Ashe turned to Granger, tilted her head toward the door. "You should probably leave, just in case." She did have the rat under multiple spells, but it wasn't impossible the reversion would wake him up. And there's no telling what might happen then. She wasn't particularly worried that whoever it was would spring up and kill them all — if nothing else, the rat did _not_ look well — but she'd rather not expose a student even to such a small risk.

"I'm staying."

"Miss Granger—"

"Ginny and I have both changed with that thing in the room, Professor," Granger said, glaring now — not at Ashe, but at the rat, eyes narrowed in offended anger. "I want to know who it is."

Great, so, not only did they have a probable unregistered animagus, but one who had likely used his abilities to peep on underage girls. Fab. Ashe let out a brief, aggravated sigh, but gave into the argument with a nod — she knew if it were her, she'd... Well, she'd probably try to curse the arse, actually, she should watch out for that. "Stand up, Minerva, I can't seal the room if you're touching the door."

The flush in her cheeks finally fading and her breaths finally easing, Minerva nodded, stepping away from the door. A single rune sketched into the air, and Ashe's emergency isolation wards snapped closed. Even if the man knocked them all out, he'd then have to crack her wards to get into the rest of the castle — that was certainly possible, but he'd alert Dumbledore, Filius, and Severus in the process. Ashe found it hard to imagine anyone could slip past all three of them at once.

Scooping up the rat, Ashe placed it in the middle of the floor, took a step back and drew her wand. "Do you know the basic stunning charm, Miss Granger?"

"Oh, er, you mean _stupeat_ , right?" Granger sidled around a bit, so the three of them formed an even circle, pulling out her wand and aiming at the rat between them.

"That's the one. If he even twitches, stun him. He probably won't wake up, but we have no idea who this is — it's possible he's dangerous."

Granger looked a little grimmer than she had a moment ago, but she didn't waver, her fingers tightening around her wand and her lips narrowing to a hard line. Bloody Gryffindors.

She bit back the urge to sigh, barely — at this rate, Granger and Potter were going to get themselves killed before they graduated. "Alright, Minerva. Let's see who our guest is."

Minerva was giving her a look. Ashe couldn't say exactly what kind of look, something that had her eyes twinkling, her lips pulled into the faintest smile. Whatever she was thinking, she didn't say anything, her eyes falling closed as she focused. Magic rose on the air, crackling around the older witch almost audibly — Minerva might be often irritating, and a bit too literally-minded, but Ashe couldn't deny she was rather impressive when she put the effort in (more powerful than Ashe, certainly) — and with a sharp jab of her wand the rat was struck with a blue spellglow. There was a brief flash of white light, and a moment later the rat was gone, a young man lying on the rug in its place.

Ashe hissed out a curse — in Elvish, there _was_ a student in the room. That the rat was an animagus had been the most rational explanation, but she'd still been hoping she was mistaken. Apparently not. He looked about as unwell as the rat had, his fingernails too long and cracked, his skin showing an unhealthy yellow-ish tinge, his hair apparently falling out — whether from stress or malnourishment, hard to say. His clothes, jeans and a muggle-made jumper, were filthy and tattered, splashed with stains here and there. He hadn't gotten treatment for that missing finger, the stump was misshapen, had probably gone through a period of infection. It looked bad enough, the skin torn and contorted, Ashe was honestly surprised he'd survived.

Oh, and he smelled fucking awful. Ashe was going to need some serious air-freshening charms, and it might be better to just burn that damn rug...

"So. Does anyone recognise him?" Not wanting to touch the filthy man, Ashe pushed at his shoulder with her shoe, tipping him onto his back.

Minerva gasped, a hand jumping up to cover her mouth. "That's _Peter Pettigrew!_ " Granger jumped at the name, staring at the man wide-eyed, seeming just as shocked as Minerva.

The name was faintly familiar — she'd probably heard it before but, turning it over for a moment with a frown, Ashe couldn't place it. "Who?"

"Oh, _Ashe_ , you know Peter, he was..." Minerva cut off, blinked to herself. "The Marauders were before your time, I forgot."

"You mean James Potter's friends." The staff who had been around at the time — the 70s weren't so very long ago, so that was most of them — had regaled her with stories about them often enough, especially since the Boy Who Lived had come to the school a couple years back now. Severus had a _very_ different attitude toward them, and reading between the lines Ashe was inclined to favour the picture of them he painted. It wasn't out of the question the others would choose to remember people who'd died heroes charitably. If she remembered correctly, there was Potter, Remus was one of them, and of course— "Wait a second, wasn't Pettigrew the kid Black was framed for murdering?"

Minerva gaped at her for a second. " _Framed?!"_

"In case you haven't been paying attention the last few seconds, Minerva, Black couldn't possibly have murdered Pettigrew. He's right here."

It didn't seem like Minerva much approved of the hint of condescension on her voice, a shade of irritation piercing through her shock. "I _realise_ that, Ashe, I'm just— How do you know Black was _framed?!"_

"Because it's obvious? He was supposedly killed in an explosion that killed a dozen people, but all they found of him were a single, intact finger and bloody robes? Honestly, Minerva, don't you—"

" _Thank you!"_ Granger clapped her hand over her mouth with a strangled _eep_.

Ashe couldn't quite resist shooting the girl a crooked smirk. "You'll notice he's missing a finger — it wasn't properly treated, either, it's obvious Pettigrew is no Healer. And, unless I'm _very_ much mistaken..." With a flick of her wrist, both of Pettigrew's sleeves were dragged up to his elbows.

The Dark Mark was emblazoned on Pettigrew's left forearm. It didn't appear quite so dramatic as it'd been in the War — or so she heard, she'd never seen one before the Dark Lord's fall. Instead it looked exactly like Severus's did now, a raised scar an angry red, formed into the now infamous skull and snake. Minerva sucked in a dragging, shuddering gasp.

"So," Ashe said, giving the speechless older woman a mild, false smile. "Do want to call the Aurors, or should I?"

* * *

__

_June_

* * *

"I've been wondering, why are you called Mistwalkers, anyway? I asked Daphne, but she didn't sound very certain."

Thankfully, Babbling didn't seem at all offended by the question — sometimes Hermione couldn't guess what was and wasn't offensive to ask people about their culture, it was far too easy to stick her foot in her mouth. (The way Daphne had brushed off the same question...) If anything, Babbling seemed faintly amused, one corner of her lips curling up. "I'm not surprised, people have been calling us that for so long most have forgotten what it originally meant. Let me guess, Daphne made a joke about it being foggy on Anglesey."

Hermione huffed, rolling her eyes. "Something like that, yes."

"A lot of people just leave it at that, but that's not actually where it comes from." Babbling pulled her wand, gave it a little flick toward her shelves. "The history of what are now called the Mistwalker Clans is sort of complicated — it doesn't help that how the old priesthoods functioned was altered significantly when the secular government took over the administration of law." A book, apparently summoned by that wand flick, came to a rest in front of her, she started flipping through it. "But the name is actually older than the centralised cults organised on Anglesey in the centuries after the formation of the Wizengamot, and it once referred to something quite different." Babbling picked up the book and turned it around before handing it to Hermione.

The text was more or less illegible to her. It was obviously in a Romance language, but she wasn't certain which one — it couldn't be French (Hermione spoke French nearly as well as English), and it wasn't Spanish, maybe Italian? It was familiar enough she could probably skim it if she spent enough time on it, but foreign enough she couldn't read it. Most of the left-side page was taken up by a finely-detailed drawing of three figures, dressed in rough-looking leather and loosely-draped cloth checkered red and yellow and green. (The pattern on the cloth looked vaguely like tartan, but simpler, presumably more primitive.) Two of them were carrying shields — one with a rough drawing of three birds (ravens?) circling a spiral, the other two leaping wolves, jaws wide — one of the men armed with a spear and the other a short, straight sword. The third figure, a hair shorter and slighter than the other two, had what looked like long knives hanging from each hip and a bow and quiver strapped to his back.

No, Hermione realised, belatedly, the third figure was a woman — she hadn't noticed, the only difference obvious at first glance was that the other two had full beards.

All three of them had colourful tattoos, showing on their arms, their legs, even their faces. They were in dark colours, black and red and blue, interlacing bands that seemed to alternate between organic curves and hard angles. It was sort of unnerving, actually, the way the lines of the tattoos crossed their faces, exaggerating their features, making them look fierce and alien.

It didn't take too long for Hermione to figure out what this was supposed to be — it helped that what little she picked out from the text at a glance seemed to be talking about the Roman conquest of Britain. "I thought the stories about the painted warriors of ancient Britain were a myth."

Babbling's lips tilted in a rueful smile. "Yes, well, most of the Roman documents that mentioned the practice also explicitly described the obviously magical effects. They couldn't well have muggles getting their hands on that sort of thing, could they?"

Hermione entirely failed to suppress a scowl. She was aware, now, that in the years immediately after the adoption of the Statute of Secrecy, mages had scoured historical artifacts and records of anything that would too strongly hint at their own existence — they still intervened, sometimes, when new excavation turned up something objectionable. In some cases, they defaced monuments, even _outright destroyed_ evidence that couldn't be easily hidden away. It was extremely annoying to think that most of the history she'd learned, _their own history_ , had significant gaps that either only mages remembered or had been obliterated entirely out of existence. And the mages had been _sloppy_ , more concerned with hiding themselves than preservation, there was no telling how much had been lost forever in the process.

(Sometimes Hermione hated the Statute of Secrecy.)

"Until the arrival of the Romans," Babbling was saying, "the wand had never made it to Britain. Well, that isn't entirely true — the wand is a Near Eastern invention, spread throughout the Old World through ancient trade routes. A small number of Greek traders got to Britain before the Romans did. A branch of the Elaíoin family, famous early Greek enchanters, settled in Britain very early on, searching for new materials and new techniques. Their descendants are the Ollivanders now."

"Wait, so, that sign at the Ollivanders' shop saying they've been making wands since the Fourth Century B.C., that's actually true? I thought they just made that up." The wand maker had told her his family had come over with the Romans, but the first Romans to set foot on the island wouldn't come until Caeser's expedition three centuries later...

Babbling shrugged. "The Elaíoin family have been making wands for centuries longer than that, and they certainly pre-date the Roman presence on the island. It's very well possible they were here around that time — I'm certain the exact year they claim is nonsense, though, records that precise simply didn't exist in Britain back then.

"But anyway, a branch of the Elaíoin family may have been operating here — though certainly not in London, probably somewhere in Essex or Kent — but the wand hadn't really been adopted by the locals. It's possible a few people picked it up, but the vast majority of the British mages continued to use their native magics. From what we can tell, these mostly consisted of various forms of witchcraft — ritual, potions, divination, and so forth. Powerful magic, yes, but slow, and requiring meticulous planning. Not really useful in a fight.

"This was the exception," Babbling said, reaching forward to tap the drawing. "In what would have been a lengthy process that probably lasted weeks, a priest — or _druid_ , if you like — would mark a volunteer with some kind of designs. We don't know exactly what they looked like, though this depiction is our best guess, or what the ink was made of — I would figure some kind of metallic base, probably high in copper or zinc or tin. The effect was to magically enhance the human body, permanently.

"Contemporary sources, mostly written by outsiders, describe people who are faster and stronger than ordinary humans should possibly be. People who could outrun horses, could crush bones with their bare hands, could throw spears stunning distances with terrifying accuracy. People who could function days without sleep, could fight for hours nonstop without tiring, and seemed shockingly resistant to pain, walked off injuries that would incapacitate lesser men. They were sometimes seen on the battlefield, yes, but they were more often used as assassins — slipping in, killing enemy commanders, and slipping out, undetected. Our enemies were terrified of them, spoke of them as though they were some kind of supernatural monster.

"During the Roman period, they came to be known as _caliginevasores_ — mistwalkers."

" _Caligi_..." Hermione frowned. "The term was originally intended to mean people who walk through _darkness_ , wasn't it."

Babbling's lips twitched. " _Caligo_ could mean either, who can say?"

"If they _meant_ to say mist or fog, wouldn't they use _nebula_?"

The half-hidden smile spread into a full-on smile, Babbling chuckled a little. "Yes, well, possibly. Much of the intended meaning of a word is too often lost in translation, I've found. Whatever the original intent, 'mistwalker' is the term that stuck in English. In British languages as well, actually, a literal translation of the Latin term was borrowed in, replaced whatever the native word had been.

"But, back to history. These methods gradually became less common over time. As the wand spread through the Isles in the centuries after Roman contact, such...extreme measures were no longer considered quite so necessary as they had before. When the formal priesthoods of Anglesey were organised, they were some of the few who still remembered how to do it at all. They were given special sanction by the Wizengamot to continue the practice — these cults were the Mistwalker Clans in the sense that they were the only people who knew how to make mistwalkers anymore — but it still declined over the next centuries. The last known true mistwalkers in the historical record were the Bloodravens, a small cadre of warriors sworn to Gwenffrewi of Aberdyfi as part of her war to unseat Ignatius Gaunt — he was one of the more successful Dark Lords in British history, ruling from this very castle through much of the Thirteenth Century.

"There are no true mistwalkers, and there haven't been for hundreds of years. Even we don't know how it was done anymore, what documentation we had was lost in the chaos shortly before Secrecy. But, though the practice has been extinct for nearly half of British history, the name stuck, and we are still the Mistwalker Clans."

"I see." Hermione gazed at the drawing a moment longer, chewing at her lip. "That doesn't quite make sense, I don't think."

"Oh? Which part?"

"The wand is very... _convenient_ , yes, but there are significant limits to wizardry. I mean, it may have declined quite a bit over the centuries, but witchcraft still hasn't _entirely_ died, and I doubt it ever will." Of course, Hermione wasn't convinced that the Wizengamot proscribing certain 'primitive' magics wasn't in large part to blame for the decline of witchcraft — partially, she suspected, to make magic less accessible to muggles in the centuries immediately preceding Secrecy. After all, many potions and most forms of ritual didn't actually require the user be a mage, and Seers were, supposedly, more or less equally common among muggles as mages. Wizardry was also far more predictable, and far more easily regulated. Phasing out witchcraft was, in some ways, more a political decision than a practical one.

But anyway, as she was thinking, potions were still ubiquitous, because they could accomplish ends wizardry couldn't easily manage (at least not yet). Certain more esoteric arts, such as most forms of blood magic and ritual alchemy, were simply impossible to approximate with a wand. And there was _one_ form of witchcraft, at least, which would never die out — even if everything else was superceded by wizardry, wands themselves were enchanted artifacts, so "runic" magic, one of the primary branches of witchcraft, would never be abandoned. The particular point she was thinking of was, "Some of those effects you described, there aren't modern spells or potions that can reproduce them. Maybe temporarily, in some cases, but. And, I can't imagine the mistwalkers were the _only_ example of this sort of magic, body modification has turned up in one form or another in virtually every culture on the face of the planet. Involving magic in it somehow just seems logical."

"Oh, body modification is still practised by mages, obviously," Babbling said, one shoulder lifting in a light shrug. "Mostly in the form of piercings and scarification, tattooing is rarer — excluding cultures that have a long history of it, of course, particularly in the Far East and the Americas. Here in Britain, you won't see it much in the noble class. There was a claim going around a couple centuries ago that 'damaging' the body crippled one's ability to channel magic, and while we know this isn't necessarily true now the attitude stuck.

"Outside the nobility, though, there's a tradition of scarification by cutting, usually along the outer thighs, ribs, and shoulders, and piercings are _very_ common, almost everyone will have them done. Not so much on the ears — Celts have always worn their hair long, gets in the way — but nose and lip piercings are almost ubiquitous, most people will have at least one of the two. Nipple and genital piercings are less frequent, but still common. Various surface piercings are _very_ common, especially in certain subcultures, where it practically functions as a rite of passage."

Hermione felt uncomfortably warm — she tried _very hard_ to not think about the idea of nipple and genital piercings. "Ah, I thought surface piercings were rather new, relatively speaking. There are practical considerations, you know, the healing process tends to reject them."

For some reason, Babbling's lips were twitching with a suppressed smile, but she didn't voice whatever she was thinking. "There are ways around that. In the modern form, the bar of the jewelry is enchanted with a particular healing spell that prevents migration or rejection. They're more or less permanent, barring complications. I used to have a fair number of them myself. The Mistwalker Clans happen to be one of those subcultures where everyone has extensive surface piercings done, they were incorporated into our old rituals — I did the whole series back when I was a teenager." Babbling pulled her hair aside, ran her finger along the back of her shoulder curving up to the nape of her neck. "I used to have several along here, and a few more along here," she said, tracing near her collarbone. "There was a line of them down my lower back, and a pair of lines starting high on my hips and curving down."

She couldn't exactly point, with the desk in the way, but the gestures she was making with both hands made it pretty obvious what she meant. Hermione suspected her face might be quite red now, her eyes turned up to the ceiling.

"I had all my surface piercings removed before I went to university in France. The jewelry we use is enchanted, I didn't realise it was something muggles did at all. I had several facial piercings, too — a stud here," touching the left side of her upper lip, "two rings here," the right side of her lower lip, "a ring and a stud here," her left nostril, "a ring here," her left eyebrow, "and two bars here," her right eyebrow, "until the day before my interview with Dumbledore. The nobility doesn't think much of nearly any sort of body modification, and Hogwarts is a school of the nobility, it seemed prudent. I've considered off and on getting the surface piercings redone, at least, but I've never gotten around to it."

Hermione couldn't help wondering if she hadn't removed quite _everything_ — she'd said surface and facial piercings, but that left a couple particular options. But those were...sensitive locations, it didn't seem appropriate to ask. "I'm sorry, Professor, I _really_ can't imagine all that. It just seems...extreme."

That almost Snape-ish raised eyebrow, Hermione had the uncomfortable feeling Babbling knew _exactly_ what she'd been thinking a second ago. "I suppose it is by muggle British standards, and even among mages it's a little bit out of the ordinary. But it's not at all unusual for Mistwalkers — though you won't see Daphne or Miss Bones doing it, they're too close to the nobility, or little Luna Lovegood, her family doesn't live with the clan. But the piercings I had were perfectly average for Mistwalkers, some people do more. I have a cousin with seventy-nine piercings total, actually, and that's _after_ removing about a dozen of them when she was about to have her first child."

" _Seventy-nine_?" How is that even _possible_?!

Babbling shrugged. "Magic does away with all of the practical issues muggles have to deal with, so if you think it's pretty there's really no reason to not do it. Back to what I was saying a bit ago, though, piercings and scarification are common in the magical world, tattoos less so, but, though they're often _achieved_ with magical assistance, these don't produce any magical _effects_ , beyond some minimal enchantments on the jewelry itself.

"If you want magical effects, things that change the body permanently, the best available solution is blood alchemy. Alterations made through blood alchemy are even heritable, though that is optional."

It took a moment for Hermione to focus back on the topic at hand — the idea of people going to quite that extreme (and Babbling _especially_ ) was, just, absurd, and distracting. "Ah... I was under the impression the traits that can be created through blood alchemy are rather limited. Mostly superficial, and a few minor magical abilities, like parseltongue."

A crooked smile pulling at her lips, Babbling said, " _Superficial_ might be underselling it a bit — I once met a French witch who had _feathers_ , you know. But yes, the sort of abilities the old mistwalkers had cannot be achieved with blood alchemy, that's true."

"Why don't people still do it, then? I mean, you said it was phased out because the proliferation of the wand made magic more convenient, but many of the abilities of the old mistwalkers aren't reproducible."

Babbling sighed. "Because the direct enchantment of the human body is _extremely dangerous_ , Miss Granger."

"Er...what?"

"Think about it. You've read of the sort of accidents that can result from poorly-designed enchantments and wards. I've told you of just how catastrophically _awful_ a failed free cast spell can go. Now, keeping in mind all the potential failure points, and the unpredictable effects these failures can generate, and remember the target _and medium_ of the enchantment is _a person_."

Hermione winced — somehow, the implications of that hadn't quite clicked. Sometimes, runic magic could go very, very badly, if the person carving the script messed up a sign, or if their attention wandered during the process, or if the script was flawed somehow. Not only badly, but sometimes very _strangely_ , generating effects that were sometimes entirely unique.

"A flawed enchantment targeting the mind has been known to drive the subject insane, immediately or gradually over time, in some cases killing them instantly, as efficiently and finally as the Green Death." The Killing Curse, she meant, the Unforgivable one — the same one Harry was renown for being the only known survivor of. Babbling always called it that to be more specific, there were actually several spells referred to as _killing curses_. "A flawed enchantment targeting the body could do who knows what — flesh so hardened it seems to be stone, bones splintering, the body incinerating itself to ash from the waste energy alone. The old priests were reliable, their methods refined over uncounted centuries, but even they sometimes failed, and their knowledge has been lost. In their absence, any attempt to recreate the feat is prone to catastrophic failure, almost guaranteed to result in the death of the subject. It's simply not worth the risk.

"Not for most people, anyway," Babbling said, with an easy shrug far too light for the subject matter. "There are some small communities living on the wrong side of the law who use some limited applications, but it is no longer considered a legitimate practice. Permanent human corporal augmentation is considered a class-four Dark Art in Britain, in fact."

From her reading this year, Hermione knew Britain divided restricted magics into five categories. They ranged from Class I — magics not approved to be taught in schools, but otherwise permissible — up to Class V — magics that were absolutely banned in all circumstances with no exceptions, which the punishment for using was invariably capital. ("Unforgivable" was a colloquial synonym for a Class V Dark Art.) Class IV, if Hermione remembered correctly, was the category for magics that could only be used with explicit state sanction, usually by Aurors or Unspeakables; the punishment for anyone else caught using them was quite harsh, decades in Azkaban.

Normally, she really didn't know how she felt about the government telling people what magic they could or could not use, or even _own books_ about. If playing with this stuff really did pose a high risk of the subject _dying horribly_...Hermione guessed that made perfect sense.

"Recent experiments in fixing mobile wards into body jewelry are safer and far more interesting, I think."

Hermione blinked. "You can create _mobile wards_? _How?!"_

Her eyes lighting up, Babbling laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> Gellert Grindelwald — _I don't care what new material might be coming out, fuck the police, I'm sticking with my old headcanon. Grindelwald won't actually be important to the story in any way, only little references here and there. Just keep in mind we're not talking a wizard Hitler sort of guy here._
> 
> Green Lady — _As in my other fics, this is supposed to be the Egyptian goddess Wadjet. She was a real person, she really did invent runic magic, and she was instrumental in the development of the very idea of magic theory in general. She is still alive, Babbling wasn't lying about having met her, though she mostly keeps to herself these...well, this millennium, really. Won't ever show up in-story, but she is an historical figure everyone has heard about._
> 
> [Black's not fool enough to do anything in Hogsmeade] — _In case anyone's considering accusing me of unreasonable Ron-bashing, that is a direct quote from canon. Seriously, how much of an idiot is this guy?_
> 
> Ynys Dywyll — _Real place, the official name is Ynys Môn in Welsh and Anglesey in English._
> 
> O-levels — _The GCE Ordinary Level was phased out in 1988, after Babbling's time._
> 
> * * *
> 
> _So, this is a random fic idea I had a while back, because Dark Lady Hermione is a thing that I decided needed to exist. I finished the first chapter a few days ago, so I decided to throw it up._
> 
> _Hermione's development from a somewhat disillusioned middle-class teenager to the leader of a violent revolution is going to be very gradual — in fact, through the death of Voldemort the major plot events are going to be mostly unchanged, outside of a few important deviations. What I mean to say is, don't expect her to be throwing dark curses at people in fifth year or anything, she has a long road to walk down._
> 
> _Also, I suspect the Hermione/Babbling relationship was foreshadowed heavily enough that saying it'll be a thing isn't a big spoiler. (I even put it in the tags this time, which I don't normally do.) It's not really a major focus of the plot (especially after sixth year), though Ashe does (accidentally) inspire the development of her eventual absurd magical abilities._
> 
> _I don't expect updates to this will be very frequent. I plan for this fic to be a little over a dozen longer chapters — sometimes very long — and I have other projects going on. They'll be posted when I finish them._
> 
> _—Lysandra_


End file.
